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ROD SERLING’S

GHT

NEW JOURNEYS
OF THE IMAGINATION

I'*-

ZONE

MAGAZINE

JANUARY 1982/ $2

EIGHT EXTRAORDINARY
STORIES THAT OPEN
NEW DIMENSIONS

SANTA VISITS THE
TWILIGHT ZONE IN
ROD SERLING’S
CLASSIC TV SCRIPT

AN INSIDER’S VIEW
OF LOVECRAFT

BOOKS. MOVIES,
SHOW-BY-SHOW GUIDE,
AND ... ALWAYS ...
THE UNEXPECTED

‘GHOST STORY’

FULL-COLOR PREVIEW
OF THE NEW HORROR BLOCKBUSTER
WITH AN AUTHOR’S EYE-VIEW
FROM PETER STRAUB

EXPLORE INNER SPACE:

‘MISS MOUSE & THE 4TH DIMENSION’
BY ROBERT SHECKLEY

ROD SERLING RECALLS HIS
MOST MEMORABLE CHRISTMAS

TWILIGHT CASTS A SPELL

IN ‘OF SLEDS AND FORTY WINTERS’

THE CLASSIC HAUNTED HOUSE TALE
BY GHOST STORY MASTER
J. SHERIDAN LE FANU

EXCLUSIVE TZ INTERVIEW:

FRANK BELKNAP LONG
RECALLS HIS YEARS WITH
THE MASTER OF MODERN HORROR

AN ACCIDENT EXPOSES
A WOMAN’S BIZARRE SECRET
IN ‘DREAM ALONG WITH ME’
BY REGINALD BRETNOR

THE JOY A TERROR OF MIRACLES:
‘LOST AND FOUND’ BY CONNIE WILLIS

A TALE OF JAZZ, THE DEVIL,
AND DEATH BY PARKE GODWIN

‘TWILIGHT ZONE' ON TV
GAHAN WILSON
THEODORE STURGEON

C O N T E N T S

rW f ROD SERUNG’S

IWiUGHT

^ Jj* MAGAZINE

FEATURES January 1982

In the Twilight Zone

Other Dimensions: Books

Theodore Sturgeon

Other Dimensions: Screen

Gahan Wilson

TZ Interview: Frank Belknap Long

Tom Collins

Screen Preview: ‘Ghost Story’

Robert Martin

The Essential Writers: J. Sheridan LeFanu

Mike Ashley

Show-by-Show Guide to TV’s ‘Twilight Zone’: Part Ten

Marc Scott Zicree

TZ Classic Teleplay: ‘The Night of the Meek’

Rod Serling

FICTION

Influencing the He 1 Out of Time and Teresa Golowitz

Parke Godwin

Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension

Robert Sheckley

Dream Along with Me

Reginald Bretnor

My Most Memorable Christmas

Rod Serling

Lost and Found

Connie Willis

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

J. Sheridan LeFanu

Of Sleds and Forty Winters

Vic Johnson

The Autumn Visiters

t Frank Belknap Long

Final Version

John Morressy

Cover art by Carl Chaplin

I N T Tl E T~W I L I S H T ~Z~~0 N E

“The sunsets were red . . .

. . . the nights were long, and the
weather pleasantly frosty; and
Christmas, the glorious herald of the
New Year, was at hand, when an
event— still recounted by winter
firesides, with a horror made
delightful by the mellowing influence
of years— occurred in the beautiful
little town of Golden Friars, and
signalized, as the scene of its
catastrophe, the old inn known
throughout a wide region of the
Northumbrian counties as the George
and Dragon.”

So begins “The Dead Sexton,” by
the Victorian ghost-story master
J. SHERIDAN LEFANU. The tale
catches LeFanu in an uncharacter-
istically cozy mood, and in An
Account of Some Strange Disturbances
in Aungier Street, reprinted in this
issue (along with six new woodcuts by
that most versatile and - dependable of
artists, JOSE REYES), LeFanu’s
tone is positively humorous.

But there’s another, far bleaker
side to the man, as anyone knows
who’s read such classics of cruelty as
“Green Tea,” “The Familiar,”
“Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” and
“Schalken the Painter”— and as
becomes clear in the profile of
LeFanu contributed by literary sleuth
MIKE ASHLEY. We noted, in the
last issue, that Ashley has written the
invaluable reference book Who’s Who
in Horror and Fantasy Fiction. He
has also written four volumes of a
History of the Science Fiction
Magazine, has edited a number of sf
and weird fiction anthologies, and is
currently working on a biography of
supernatural writer Algernon
Blackwood. Ashley’s taste for literary
research began, he says, when he
tried to locate stories that, as a child,
he’d heard recounted by his father.
Since one of the reasons people read
fantasy is to recapture, if only
fleetingly, some of childhood’s
wonder and terror, the genesis of
Ashley’s interest seems only
appropriate.

Speaking of genesis ... In this
issue we cheerfully violate one of the
magazine world’s most cherished taboos
by featuring a genuine, honest-to-God
Adam and Eve story, a breed that
most editors have exiled to Siberia.
Final Version seems a special case,
though; it displays the same
irreverent wisdom you’ll find in Mark
Twain’s “Letters from the Earth.”

Twain retells the Eden myth from
a distinctly humane point of view. He
ridicules God’s warning about the
forbidden fruit: the penalty for eating
it was death, but the word would have
had no meaning for Adam and Eve.

Furthermore, Twain has nothing
but scorn for the punishment God
visits upon his luckless creations.

“The best minds will tell you,” he
observes, “that when a man has
begotten a child, he is morally bound
to tenderly care for it, protect it from
hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it,
feed it, bear with its waywardness,
lay no hand upon it save in kindness
and for its own good, and never in
any case inflict upon it a wanton
cruelty. God’s treatment of his
earthly children, every day and every
night, is the exact opposite of all
that, yet those best minds warmly
justify these crimes, condone them,
excuse them, and indulgently refuse
to regard them as crimes at all, when
he commits them ....

“God banished Adam and Eve
from the Garden, and eventually
assassinated them. All for disobeying
a command which he had no right to
utter. But he did not stop there, as
you will see. He has one code of
morals for himself, and quite another
for his children. He requires his
children to deal justly— and gently—
with offenders, and forgive them
seventy-and-seven times; whereas he
deals neither justly nor gently with
anyone, and he did not forgive the
ignorant and thoughtless first pair of
juveniles even their first small
offense and say, ‘You may go free
this time, I will give you another
chance.’ On the contrary! He elected
to punish their children, all through
the ages to the end of time, for a
trifling offense committed by others

before they were born. He is
punishing them yet.”

Final Version is a story Twain
might have aporoved of. Its author,
JOHN MORRGSSY, lives, if not in
Eden, at least in rural New Hamp-
shire, where he teaches English lit at
Franklin Pierce College. Aside from
much excellent short fiction, he’s the
author of the fantasy Graymantle
(Playboy Press) and is completing an
sf novel, The Mansions of Space.

From God and man to god and
woman . . . REGINALD BRETNOR
returns in this issue with a cautionary
tale about relations with immortals,
and about the golden dreams that lie
within even the humblest of mortals.
If, like us, you read The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction back in
the late 1950s and ’60s, you may
never be able to scan the menu in an
Italian restaurant without thinking of
a certain outrageous pun— “Don’t you
know that you’ve just had a first-
class chicken citch a Tory?” It can be
found in an episode of “Through
Time and Space with Ferdinand
Feghoot,” a series of comical tall
tales which Bretnor wrote under the
anagrammatical pseudonym “Grendel
Briarton,” and which ended in puns
about a worldwide “nude rally tea
pact” and “the pair o’ doxies of time
travel” and the like. (The series was
later parodied oy Randall Garrett;
Feghoot became “Benedict
Breadfruit,” and one of the more
improbable tales ended with a nod to
the original’s creator: “I believe I can
get that reg annulled, Bete Noir. ”)
Bretnor has been writing sf since
1947, and has edited a number of
critical symposia on the subject,
including the first major work of this
kind— Modem Science Fiction, Its
Meaning and Its Future— back in

Photo credits: Godwin/Doris Chase; Morressy/Barbara Morressy; Sturgeon/Marc Scott Zicree

1953. He’s also covered sf for two
editions of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, which means he’s
probably been quoted (and plagiarized)
in untold thousands of student papers
all over the world.

CONNIE WILLIS is a highly
accomplished writer whose work
you’ll be seeing more of in TZ. One of
her stories, “Daisy in the Sun,” was
up for a 1980 Hugo, and she appeared
this past summer in a Berkley
Showcase volume. Ace has just
brought out her novel Water Witch,
written with Cynthia Felice. The
story we print here, Lost and Found, j
is one of the best wcrks of religious
fantasy we’ve ever read, and should
garner for her, at the very least,
several more award nominations.

This issue marks YIC JOHNSON’S
first appearance in a national fiction
magazine, but he’s made his living
writing and designing for a number
of industrial and outdoors journals in
the Midwest. We can’t think of a
more perfect story fcr Twilight
Zone’s Christmas issue than the
haunting Of Sleds ani Forty Winters.

Welcome back to TOM COLLINS,
indefatigable filmgoer, playgoer, and
bibliophile, who allows us to meet one
of the enduring names in American
fantasy, FRANK BELKNAP LONG;
to PARKE GODWIN, whose
Arthurian novel Fire'xrrd was a
World Fantasy Award nominee, and
who’s been hailed by Algis Budrys as
“a major find, a convincing
researcher, and a master novelist”
(“With its superb prcse and sweeping
imagination,” writes Budrys in a
forthcoming review, Firelord brings
to life a realer King Arthur than we
have ever seen before ”); and to
ROBERT SHECKLEY, whose
novel The Game of X spawned the
recent Disney movie Condorman,
which in turn has spa wned Baskin-
Robbins’s “Condorman Crunch,”
making Sheckley the first science
fiction writer ever to have inspired a
new flavor of ice cream.

Starting next month, Sheckley
will become TZ’s book reviewer, for
with this issue THEODORE
STURGEON bids farewell to our
magazine in order to devote himself
more fully (and here, at least, is a
matter for rejoicing) ;o his own
fiction, something the world has seen
far too little of lately. Ted is a
decent, fair-minded soul, a friend to

good writing and to writers
everywhere. It was a privilege to
share these pages with him.

Better Late Than Never Department:

One occasionally reads about
convicted criminals who, long after
their deaths, are officially cleared of
any wrongdoing, usually through the
efforts of their widows or
descendants. While the revised
verdict comes years too late to
matter to the men themselves,
there’s presumably a certain solace,
for the living, in knowing that at last
the record has been set straight.

Similarly, there’ve been a number
of factual errors which have found
their way into our pages over the
past few months and which, even at
this late date, should still be
acknowledged and corrected.

For the record, then, let us note
that the dramatic photos of
Halloween II in our November issue
were the work of Kim Gottlieb; that
it was Eoin Sprott (and none other)
who constructed Wolfen’s wolf
puppets; and that the celebrated sf
story “Farewell to the Master” was
written by (and how did this slip past
us?) Harry Bates.

In the wake of our two-part TZ
Interview with him, Richard
Matheson notes that it was Bert
Granet who produced The Twilight
Zone’s final year, and he has kindly
supplied some corrections to our
article “Matheson .in the Movies.” He
writes: “The third Kolchak script I
did with William F. Nolan was
entitled The Night Killers. Dying
Room Only was produced by Alan
Epstein for Lorimar, which also did
Trespass. The Strange Possession of
Mrs. Oliver was produced by Stan
Shpetner, not Dan Curtis.”

Finally, let us note that John
Brahm should have been credited as
director of the Twilight Zone episode
“Mr. Dingle, the Strong.” (Thanks to
alert reader Robert Anderson for
pointing this out.)

Occasionally, in future issues, our
Show-by-Show Guide will list credits
that differ slightly from those on
your tv screen. However, before you
take pen in hand, be warned: more
often than not it will be the tv
version that’s in error and the
magazine version that’s correct.

Trust us.

— TK

En rt ROD SERLING’S

jWIUGHT

MAGAZINE

TZ Publications Inc.

S. Edward Orenstein
President & Chairman
Sidney Z. Gellman
Secretary! Treasurer
Leon Garry
Eric Protter

Executive Vice-Presidents

Executive Publisher:

S. Edward Orenstein
Publisher: Leon Garry
Associate Publisher and
Consulting Editor: Carol Serling
Editorial Director: JEric Protter

Editor: T.E.D. Klein
Managing Editor: Jane Bayer
Contributing Editors: Gahan Wilson,
Theodore Sturgeon

Design Director: Derek Burton
Art and Studio Production:

Georg the Design Group

Production Director: Edward Ernest

Controller: Thomas Schiff
Administrative Asst.:

Doreen Carrigan

Director, Marketing and Creative
Services: Rose-Marie Brooks
Public Relations Manager:

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Circulation Director:

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Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, 1981 , Volume
1, Number 10, is published monthly in the United States
and simultaneously in Canada by TZ Publications, Inc.,
800 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017. Telephone
(212) 986-9600. Copyright © 1981 by TZ Publications, Inc.
Rod Serling’s' The Twilight Zone Magazine is published
pursuant to a license from Carolyn Serling ana Viacom
Enterprises, a division of Viacom International, Inc. All
rights reserved. Controlled circulation postage paid at
Pewaukee, WI, and at New York, NY, and at additional
mailing offices. Responsibility is not assumed for unsolic-
ited materials. Return postage must accompany all unso-
licited material if return is requested. All rights reserved
on material accepted for publication unless otherwise

f jecified. All letters sent to Rod Serling’s The Twilight
one Magazine or to its editors are assumed intended for
publication. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in
part without written permission from the publishers. Any
similarity between persons appearing in fiction and real
persons living or dead is coincidental Single copies $2 in
U.S. and Canada. Subscriptions: U.S., U.S. possessions,
Canada, and APO— one year, 12 issues: $22 ($27 in
Canadian currency); two years, 24 issues: $35 ($43 in
Canadian currency). Postmaster: Send address changes
to P.O. Box 252, Mt. Morris, II 61054. Printed in U.S.A.

Books

by Theodore Sturgeon

The big one this month comes
from the practiced pens (actually,
they’re word processors) of Larry
Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s
Oath of Fealty (Timescape, $13.95
in hardcover) and it deals with an
arcology— the gigantic one-building
city usually exemplified by the work
of Paolo Soleri and the two mile-
high skyscrapers with which Frank
Lloyd Wright wished to replace
every other structure on Manhattan
Island. Todos Santos is the near-
future possibility presented to us, a
single structure a thousand feet high
on a two-square-mile base and
supplying everything its residents
could possibly want, at the ,
immediate price (besides rent and
utilities) of accepting total, though
discreet, surveillance, and the far
more subtle one of becoming
something different from the other
residents of the surrounding city,
which happens to be Los Angeles.
This difference is a cultural drift,
analagous to genetic drift, only
faster. Living with taken-for-granted
convenience and security, day in and
day out, would be quite a different
thing from making it in the
sprawling megalopolis, and would
rather quickly produce a different
kind of citizen. We get to watch this
happening; and along with it, the
most meticulous -description of the
design, construction, and
management of this hive, together
with its ecological, social, and
political impact. Along with all this,
we see in action a device similar to
that described in the memorable
Techno/Peasant’s Survival Manual:
“The ultimate computer will be
grown in a Petri dish and interfaced
with the human brain.” Some of the
people here have such an implant,
and its use and effects are
beautifully worked out. The whole
thing is cast in an exciting, swift,
and suspenseful narrative— all in all,
a fine reading experience.

Surely one of the most important
novels now afloat, and one of the
finest, is Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed
(Timescape, $2.75)— at last in
paperback. Written with power,
passion, and compassion, it is, as

well, as unique a story as this field
has yet produced. The narrative
itself begins in the seventeenth
century, but we learn that it goes
back some four thousand years. It
continues forward to the period just
before the outbreak of the Civil
War. Note: no future extrapolations,
no space ships, no zap guns. In this
alone it forms the perfect gift for
the yahoo who refuses to read
science fiction because he knows all
about Buck Rogers and Star Wars.
Butler’s style is up to the highest of
anyone’s literary standards; the
competence of her narrative design,
and the deftness of the swerves and
turns of her plot, are to be envied.
She is always in charge; and the
thing that shines over the whole
work is the sense of conviction, of
values ardently believed in. The
story of the long-lived black woman
Anyanwu and the perhaps-immortal
Doro, and the wild talents of their
seed, will remain with you long,
long after you’ve thoughtfully put
the book down.

Charles L. Grant needs no
introduction to adherents of horror
and fantasy. As an anthologist he
faithfully delivers the kind of moody

grue that fog-and-fang addicts most
enjoy. Tales f rom the Nightside
(Arkham House, $11.95) is a fine
collection of his own work, with a
Stephen King introduction and
striking drawings by Andrew
Smith— the kird of book (like all of
the Arkham product) that is a
pleasure to ha/e and to hold. The
stories have the stamp, the feel, of
Lovecraft and of Bradbury; Grant’s
own injection is the realistic
inclusion of family conflict, with all
its minutiae— the man whose love
for his kid is a very mixed thing,
the woman whose contentment with
husband and marriage is beginning
to fray, kids’ secrets which are
terribly real tc them— or just
terribly real. In short, his aim is to
make you feel that your comfortable
neighborhood is but a thin veil over
nameless horrors, and more often
than not he succeeds.

Somtow Sucharitkul is a spell-
spinner, often a spellbinder, and has
here illuminated something for me.
From time to time one comes across
the criticism that so much, perhaps
too much, of modern science fiction
is “American” in texture, something
I have always regarded as a kind of

LARRY NIVEN &
JERRY POURNELLE

OATH

FEALTY

*-«*•' r * . * ..

s ~

"’M I'*''

BY THl

AUTHORS OF LU C IFER'S HAMMER

BOOKS

; overseas nitpicking, impressed as I
! am with the width and breadth and
! depth of sf concepts. Even my
! rather limited exposure to Soviet sf
: indicates that except for an
occasional capsule of political
ideology, their reach and spread is
comparable to ours. Now along
t comes Sucharitkul with a completely
: different texture, and an exposition
| of different values, different ways of
i thinking— different from anything
I produced by the American writer;

; suddenly, then, I see the justice of
: the criticism (not a pejorative one,

| by the way) that our work is
i demonstrably American; for to the
: Japanese and distinctively other
! cultures, it must seem stridently so.

! Anyway, enjoy this book, with its
| fascinating suggestion that the great
! whales produced manlike creatures
: who infiltrated and interbred with
’ the Japanese and produced tlieir
j preoccupations with beauty and with
death; and all of this as a step
i toward the stars from a dying
earth. It’s called Starship and
Haiku (Timescape, $2.50).

Kit Reed has been sprinkling her
: spice, tart and sweet and sometimes
! terrifying and often downright
i outrageous, over the body of science
j fiction since 1958. Not since
i Margaret St. Clair has there been
| so deft and unpredictable a
; storyteller. In quality her stories
vary from excellent all the way
down to good, and I heartily
recommend Other Stories and The
Attack of the Giant Baby (Berkley,
$2.25)— and if you think that title is
\ outrageous, wait until you see the
cover!

F. Paul Wilson gives us a very
gothic Gothic with The Keep
(Morrow, $12.95). The novel, set in
: Romania during World War II,
contains an elderly scholar, his
beautiful daughter, a contingent of
German soldiers, a detachment of
SS men, their two commanding
; officers who hate and despise each
other, a handsome stranger, and a
| very original vampire. All these
! components interact satisfactorily
and, on occasion, surprisingly. If
you like big moody Gothics, you’ll
! love this one.

Adam Corby writes very well. His

The Former King (Timescape,

$2.50) builds a ragged world into
which comes a shipwrecked warrior,
who rises in this volume to be the
great warlord of the north. On the
way there is much muscle-cracking
hand-to-hand combat, much burning
and pillage . . . You’ve seen it
before, of course, and you know the
hero always wins. But Corby has
the gift; he keeps you wondering
when you know you needn’t. This
promises to be a trilogy or more.

... A Dream of Kinship
(Timescape, $2.50) is Richard
Cowper’s transplant of medieval
England into the thirtieth century,
replete with the clash of arms and
the whispers of intrigue, as the
“Kinsmen” strive to sustain a
rebirth of faith. A skillful job. . . .
Quas Starbrite (Bantam, $1.95) is
just right for the Star Wars trade,
or maybe I mean Galactica.
Chronicling the prowess of
undefeatable Quas, James R. Berry
is right in fashion .... Hot Time in
Old Town (Bantam, $2.25) by Mike
McQuay, is exactly what its cover
proclaims it to be: the adventures of
a twenty-first century hardheeling
private eye. “Can a hardboiled
private eye beat the odds in the
back alleys of tomorrow?” demands
the cover. Answer: Of course ... A
neat little curiousity, very probably

to be a collector’s item, is Unsilent
Night (NESFA Press, Box G, MIT
Branch Post Office, Cambridge, MA
02139; $10.00), the 1981 Boskone
book, by Taniti Lee. Only a
thousand copies are in print.

Between its hard covers are two
short stories, ten- poems, and one
perfectly gorgeous portrait
photograph. I rather liked the
stories; I found the poetry
undisciplined.

And this is farewell. I have
enjoyed riding TZ’s masthead more
than I have words or space to
convey. You have a good book here,
with a good editor; long may they
wave. As for me, I’m going to apply ;
my energies and attentions to my
own work instead of others’. I have
a novel going (for the first time in
more than twenty years); the
working title is Star Anguish. I do
hope you will like it. This is not,
by the way, my slow-growing
Godbody; that’s the big one, evolving
in its own massive pace.

Please do everything you possibly
can to get this species off this
planet. If we don’t, we could die
here. If we do, we will live forever;
there are no limits to growth if we
can take this pith. I’m not fighting
for my life, but for our immortality.
Thanks for listening. (S ,

OT HER DIMENS I O N S

Screen

by Gahan Wi lson

. pulverizing their innocent minds with witches and vultures and skeletons
chained in dungeons. " Walt Disney's first feature-length cartoon, Snow White
and The Seven Dwarfs, provided classic confrontations between the very very
good and the very very evil.

so on. Recently, these films, and a

Heavy Metal (Columbia)
Directed by Gerald Potterton
Screenplay by Dan Goldberg
and Len Blum

Offhand you would think that if
there was such a thing as a surefire
combination, it would be fantasy and
the animated film. In theory it
should be extremely difficult to
avoid at least flashes of excellence if
you joined the two, but that does
not seem to be the case. A kind of
curse seems to linger over the
marriage, and I can’t think precisely
why.

On the one hand you have a
creator bent on the genesis -of a
world unique to his imagination, and
on the other a fantastic medium
completely capable of bringing to
life anything whatever that this
creator can create. By now, surely—
since the magic technique's been
around for over fifty years— we
should have experienced staggering
triumphs from this blend of art and
technology.

We have not. What is amiss?

It’s true that no towering
geniuses have been attracted to the
field; there have been no Goyas nor
Bosches nor Blakes (magine William
Blake unleash’d on animation!)
involved to date, but there have
been some extremely clever and
talented people working on it, and
working very hard, to widen its
horizons and open up its promise.
Why does it remain so
claustrophobic?

It got off to a very good start
with the efforts of Winsor McCay,
the brilliant creator of the comic
strip Little Nemo, wherein he
regularly demonstrated a positively
eerie talent for odd motion effects
and spatial dislocations on the grand
scale. McCay decided to go on the
lecture circuit with an animated film
he’d designed for the purpose— a
film in which a lovable-looking
dinosaur named Gertie would
interact with him before the
audience, drinking a glass of water
McCay held up to it, coming and
leaving at the artist’s command, and

tiny scattering of other work, have
been re-released for general viewing,
thanks to dedicated efforts of
historians, and they demonstrate a
charm and a level of drawing one
wishes had been followed a little
more closely by those who came
after.

They were not, and for two
excellent reasons— the first being
simply that McCay’s successors had
nowhere near his talent nor his
draftmanship; the second being that,
if they were to get beyond the tiny
scale of his production, they would
have to abandon his painstaking
ways and hire armies of other
artists even less skillful than
themselves. These stark realities led
to the development of a school of
drawing which was slavishly
followed by all animators for years,
and which has subliminally affected
the entire field to this day.

We are all of us familiar with
the conventions of this quasi-official
style of animation, even if some of
us have paid it no conscious
attention. The body and its parts
are reduced to bloblike circles

whenever possible, the little finger
is removed from the hand for
reasons of economy, and the limbs
do not bend as though they
contained bones, but curl like
spaghetti. Everything is simple and
undetailed, and if the backgrounds
are sometimes shaded and convey a
feeling of depth, the figures moving
before them are always resoundingly
flat. Some great stuff has been done
by this school of the easily teachable
and speedily drawable doodle:

Mickey Mouse, of course, and
Donald and the rest of that gang;
Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes
group; and Max Fleischer’s Betty
Boop.

Now, the classical explanation
for hysterical symptoms and
neurotic knee-jerk reactions is that
the underlying trigger, the real
reason for them, is unknown to the
person plagued by them. It is
something so awful, usually inflicted
on the victim during early childhood,
that it has been relegated to the
unconscious where, with the passage
of time, it grows more powerful,
more able to toy with its trembling
host. For years I suffered weird

Photo by Lawrence Otway from Dime-Store Dream Parade (Dutton),
© 1979 by Robert Heide and John Gilman

SCREEN

agonies from completely silly stimuli.
Those little horns— the ones
j drummers with bad senses of humor
I used to go whoop whoop with—
would send chills through me.

Clowns appalled me, especially ones
dressed in white, and a certain kind
of dark, foxy girl entering a room
made me instantly check all exits
! and plan reasonable sounding
j excuses for a quick departure. I did
; not know the underlying reason for
these and other distressful
symptoms until I attended a
retrospective of ancient cartoon
films at some intellectuals’ haven
and, for the first time since I had
been a fat, simple child, I saw her
again. Betty Boop!

There it was, all of it— the white
| clown, the whoop whoop, and, worst
of all, the absolute epitome of the
morbid masculine mind’s conjuration
of the tricky bitch— Betty Boop!

There she was, scuttling about
lightly in her elastic flapper’s body,
everything Max Fleischer dreaded in
‘ the female sex, an awful vision of
merciless, unremitting castration. I
; realized at once, grinding my teeth
in the darkness, that she was the
: creature personally responsible for
my not having all sorts of fun with
a certain kind of dark, foxy girl.
Thanks a lot, Max Fleisher!

With Snow White, Disney,
always the bearer of Mosaic tablets
of law for lesser animators, hit on
the idea of noodging away
somewhat from the blob-and-
spaghetti people by mixing them in
with two or three more human-
seeming creatures. True, the
“humans” were only marginally
such— the wobblings of their legs
and faces indicated that they were
at least part jellyfish— but next to
Dopey and Sleepy and Grouchy,
Prince Charming almost looked like
a flesh-and-blood movie star.

Almost. Snow White also introduced
Disney’s decision not only to
continue the grand old tradition of
. scary scenes in animation, but to
take the gloves off the horror
effects and scare the shit out of the
little nippers who formed the bulk
of his clientele by pulverizing their
innocent minds with witches and
vultures and skeletons chained in
dungeons. Needless to say, they
loved it.

I wish I could say that things

have gotten better since then, but
they have not. Disney has gotten
better, or at least his enterprises
have, and if his Land and World
projects are viable hints, as I think
they are, in the early 2000s our
entire planet and all its satellites,
both natural and artificial, will be
© Walt Disney Productions. But not
his animated features. Not they.

First he gave us Fantasia,
which proved that the bulk of the
critical establishment and all but a
tiny fraction of the art-fancying
public were buffoons, since they
considered the thing an esthetic
milestone, but which was
intrinsically a disaster. Dumbo was
kind of cute, I liked the fresh birds
and the storm, but a steady
downhill trend was in sight. The
unions misunderstood and insisted
animators needed to be paid a living
wage, and from then on it was a
matter of shortcuts and dodges to
save cash whenever possible. We
were introduced to the sudden
freezing of a character when
movement was not absolutely
essential, the dead face with the
moving lips, the shadow puppet
technique of shoving fixed figures
back and forth across the screen,
and other such penny-pinching
devices— devices which were,
unhappily, brought to a fine art by
the producers of the Saturday
morning animated series shows
primarily designed to sell expensive
battery-operated toys. These dismal
productions are little more than
slide shows.

The mood of these Saturday
morning specials is very much
reflected by Heavy Metal, and I
more than suspect that, in selling
the movie to potential backers, its
producers cited the steady weekly
exposure of kids to the slam-bang
superhero sagas as a great little
audience-builder. And I suspect,
moreover, judging from the quality
of the animation, that they may
have hired some of these Saturday
morning artists.

The magazine Heavy Metal is an
interesting publishing venture. It’s a
spin-off of the recent European
vogue of producing elaborately got-
up comic books, which, in turn, may
have been inspired by the great
success of Tin-Tin and, later,

Asterix, the latter enjoying a

morbid masculine mind's conjuration
of the tricky bitch. " The cartoon world’s
own Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl, Max
Fleischer's Betty Boop, from the man
who created Popeye.

general adoration little short of
incredible. However, unlike these
earlier ventures, most of which are
fairly jolly adventure romps, the
new books tend strongly to the dark
and bizarre, and stress grotesque
scenes, violent action, and kinky
sex. The influence of the American
underground comics is obvious.

The publishers of Heavy Metal
decided to see if there was a
market for the stuff over here. It
would be a relatively inexpensive
magazine to launch— definitely a
Heavy Incentive— since it would
start out using mostly European art |
and the publishers would have to
pay only reprint rights. They tried
it, and it worked. Not sensationally
—it hasn’t been a dazzling
phenomenon of the periodical world
—but it’s done 1 quite well. I am not
one of its regular readers but I am
by no means unfamiliar with it, and
the art work is consistently
interesting: a wide variety of
techniques and approaches are
represented, same of the strips
show an extraordinarily involved
style, and there are loads of graphic '
drawings of Amazonian women
doing athletic sex. It’s extremely
naughty, but since it’s also clearly
aimed at those among us suffering
the first onsets of pubescence, the
overall effect is sort of bubble-gum
Pop, a kind of touching period
piece.

Unfortunately, in spite of what
has obviously reen an awful lot of
work, this odd charm does not
translate into the Heavy Metal
movie. It’s touchingly clear that the
producers have put much thought
into the project and are desperately
eager to please. The sound track is

"Sitting through them was like watching some solemn heavy-foot botch up a
long and complicated joke." In one of Heavy Metal’s lighter sequences, a
motley crew of extraterrestrials assemble for an outer-space jury trial.

' whomped out by such tried and
j trusted hard rock organizations as
Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult,

; and even a regrouping of a chunk of
I the old Grand Funk Railroad; the
; stories have been carefully culled
| from strips in the back files and
include a couple I remember looking
: pretty good in the original, and the
. whole business is tied up within a
! very serious and highly moral
| connecting story whose essential
point is that good does triumph over
evil, in spite of what this or that
particular episode within the film
may have made you think.

It should have worked. I would
have thought it would have worked,
but it didn’t, and I think that what
happened is that Heavy Metal ran
into animation— and animation won.

Take one of the most noticeable
I features of the magadne Heavy
• Metal: its sexy broads. Though they
: mostly tend to breasts and buttocks
1 of large, rubbery natures, they do
vary, one from the ocher, and if you
j covered their heads with paper bags
| or whatever, you would still be able
to tell them apart, at least in the
better-drawn strips; but not so in
the movie. In the movie the
animators, one and all, seem to
have learned their fe minine anatomy
! entirely by studying Barbi dolls, and
j it does not matter what sort of
j woman they are attempting to
| depict— pagan empress, nagging
j Jewish secretary, the last survivor
of a warrior race {Heavy Metal has
them all); their bodies are the same
stiff, identical tribute to that
beloved little plastic sweetheart of
\ our times. True, largs breasts have
| been added— not without a
[ considerable struggle, I am sure—
j but they are embarrassed strangers
j on that pristine Barbi chest. Not to
worry.

The men vary a little more in
! body looks, but they all seem to
move the same, a fur ny sort of
j shoulders-front lurching with the
| arms held half -bent in front of the
chest, which makes them all look
like they’re nervously running out
J onto a football field. I’ve absolutely
no explanation for this peculiarity.

One thing that does now and
then work is the background art.

; Here, every so often, the feel of the
; original magazine work does come
. through. And it’s saddening, because

it shows that, of course, the thing
could have been done properly.
Whoever it was who drew the huge
skeleton the warrior lady flies
through on her giant, featherless
pigeon {Heavy Metal is a very
special world) did it right, but the
moment stands out uncomfortably in
contrast with what comes next or
came before. There’s another story
involving a mean taxi driver with a
handy gadget for vaporizing
unwanted fares, which takes place
in the scudgy ruined city that all of
us but Mayor Koch believe
Manhattan will turn into shortly; it
has a couple of good moments, but
only here and there, and the result
is a kind of esthetic sputter.

The most effective stretch of the
film isn’t science fiction at all, but
the opening section of a story
concerning bombers in World War
II. The sequence marches along
quite briskly, there’s nice steady
movement from shot to shot, and
we have a cohesive flow of action as
the bomber gets into more and
more trouble. Then, rather
awkwardly, it turns into a ghost
story; but (and I’m afraid this is
typical of the crudity of this movie)
the ghosts aren’t ghosts at all. At
first they appear to be horribly
killed aviators brought back to an
awful mockery of life, but they turn
out to be monsters with claws and
fangs and crap like that. There’s
not a shred of pity for these dead
flyers from the animators, nor the
slightest feel for the pathos of
what’s happened to them. Just
boogeyman stuff.

One aspect of Heavy Metal
which is really odd, considering that

it is, after all, a cartoon, is its
grisly lack of humor. This isn’t all
that noticeable in the action
sequences, except, possibly, for a
tendency to overrely on the word
“asshole” to produce hilarity in the
viewer, but it shows up all too well
in the episodes trying frankly to be
funny. They are agonizingly bad in
their timing and in almost every
other aspect of technique. Sitting
though them was like watching
some solemn heavy-foot botch up a
long ;yid complicated joke. One of '
these episodes— involving a UFO
crewed by boring drug-addicted
aliens— got two, count ’em, two
laughs from a Saturady afternoon
audience which was sympathetic and
trying very hard to enjoy the movie.
The other— involving a supposedly
funny rapist/murderer/swindler/etc.—
got none, count ’em, none. I don’t
think I’ve ever seen an animated
movie kid around with less success.

I suppose this ineptness might be
excused on the grounds that the
film was being aimed at eleven-year- j
olds; but I was watching some
eleven-year-olds watching it, and it
missed.

I wish the whole picture had
been handled better. It could have
been a classic of its kind and an
inspiration to animators of the
future. As it is, the thing is only
distasteful. The really unfortunate
aspect of it is that, by being unable
to convey the magazine’s geniune if
naive and somewhat crude charm,
all that comes through are the
i magazine’s aspects— the juvenile
humor, the endless sadomasochism,
the silly plots— and you end up with
an icky movie. 10

N T E R V

Frank Belknap Long

on Literature,
Lovecraft,
and the Golden Age
of ‘Weird Tales’

THE VETERAN FANTASIST REFLECTS ON HIS EXPERIENCE
AND CONCLUDES THAT LIFE IS "MORE MYSTERIOUS THAN WE KNOW,
STRANGER AND MORE TERRIFYING."

Interviewer Tom Collins reports:

“Frank Belknap Long has lived
through a major part of science fic-
tion history in the United States and
helped shape the field when most of us
were still in our early teens,” says
Ray Bradbury.

“Frank Belknap Long is one of
science fiction’s grand old masters—
famous for his dark, somber fantasies
and vivid tales of space adventure
since the 1980s,” says Robert
Silverberg.

French critic Jacques Bergier
says Lang’s story “ The Hounds of
Tindalos” is “probably one of the ten
most terrifying and significant short
stories in all literature.” No less an
authority than Robert Bloch has
called him “a master of fantasy and
horror. ”

Surrealists have adopted him as
one of their mentors; certain practi-
tioners of magic have based spells and
ceremonies on his work. Ideas he
casually tossed intc his stories a
quarter-century or more ago turn up
today in movies and television shows
by people who may have no idea that
the territory has already been covered.

Despite scaring the pants off
generations of terrified fans, Frank
Belknap Long—H.P. Lovecraft 's be-
loved “ Belknapius”—is one of the
most revered figures in the field of
science fiction and supernatural hor-
ror. A native New Yorker, bom here
in 1903, he was an active member of

the amateur press movement in his
youth, a movement, now nearly
vanished, that was divided almost
equally among writing, printing (with
handset type), and socializing. It was
through the amateur press that he met
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the Pro-
vidence, Rhode Island, fiction writer,
poet, essayist, and correspondent.

Lovecraft admired Long’s writing
and encouraged him to turn profes-
sional. In the years since, many of
Long’s stories have attained the status '
of classics in the field. Dashiell Ham-
mett selected one of them for inclusion
in Creeps by Night, and he has been
reprinted in other anthologies, in-
cluding August Derleth’s ground-
breaking Sleep No More, Alfred
Hitchcock’s Stories for Late at Night,
Basil Davenport’s Famous Monster
Stories, and Les Daniels’s Dying of
Fright— fifty hardcover appearances
in all. Most recently, his work has
been represented in Schiffs Whispers
III, just released by Doubleday, and
in the recent Arkham House volume,
New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Long has been honored with
membership in the First Fandom
Hall of Fame, and is the recipient of
the field’s most prestigious honor, the
World Fantasy Convention’s Life ■
Achievement Award. He and Stephen
King were co-guests of honor at the
fifth World Fantasy Convention, held
in Providence in 1979.

His work may be found in several
current paperback collections— Night

Fear, The Early Long, and The Rim
of the Unknown. Novels like Space
Station Number One and Mars My
Destination are, unfortunately, out of
print, but while such books may seem
dated by scientific advances, they are
filled with a blazing sense of wonder,
an awe at the achievements of man
and the glory of the universe, that
makes the search for these books
worthwhile.

A good introduction to the author
himself may be found in The Early
Long, with its fascinating glimpses
into the formative days of sf and
fantasy, and in Arkham House’s
Dreamer on the Nightside, the gentle
memoir of his friendship with
Lovecraft. Best of all, there is a
volume of poetry, In Mayan Splendor,
which is not only charged with
wonder, magic, and delight, but re-
mains one of the most physically
beautiful volumes Arkham House has
published since its inception.

TZ: Frank, your career stretches
back to the days of the legendary
pulp magazines like Weird Tales.
What kind of reaction did Weird
Tales get when it first appeared on
newsstands back in 1923?

Long: It startled people, because
there had been nothing like it before.
It was a magazine entirely devoted to
the supernatural horror story, the
more or less traditional ghost story,
and so forth. I remember seeing the
first issue on the stands. It featured a

Frank Belknap Long

- 1

cover story by Anthony Rud called
“Ooze,” and it didn’t surprise me
that Lovecraft mentioned it in one of
his early letters to me. Of course, he
became interested immediately.

Later on, when Lovecraft came
to New York and sold five stories to
Weird Tales, he praised my work so
highly to the editor at that time, Ed-
win Baird, and to J. C. Henneberger,
the publisher, that my first story was
accepted as a matter of course. It
was called “The Desert Lich.” The
second one, “Death Waters,” ap-
peared in December, 1924.

Baird was the first editor to
publish MacKinlay Kantor, and in his
autobiography Kantor says a great
deal about Baird and praises him as a
very discerning editor. He probably
started a dozen important authors on
their careers, just as he did
Lovecraft. HPL corresponded with
him very extensively, and wrote him
several of the most interesting of the
letters published in the Arkham
House Collected Letters. In one of the
most famous ones, Lovecraft sounds
a very despairing note that reminds
me of some of the letters he wrote
later on, when he first came to New
York.

Another of my stories was ac-
cepted by Baird for Real Detective
Tales, which he also edited, but the
magazine folded and the story was
never published. Farnsworth Wright
took over Weird Tales shortly after
that and published the four stories of
mine that Baird turned over to him.
All together, Wright accepted thirty-
five of my stories in the ten-year
period I wrote for Weird Tales, and
only rejected three or four at most.
He never suggested ideas, never
changed a line or a title in all that
time.

TZ: What did you think of the illus-
trations in Weird Tales?

Long: Some of them were excellent.
An early artist, Andrew Brosnatch,
did a cover illustration of “Death
Waters.” I remember that Wright
sent me a little thumbnail sketch in
color, and that, being very young at
the time, I was thrilled. When the
magazine appeared, I showed it to
everyone. It was my first professional
sale.

Well, strictly speaking it was the
second, but the first one did not get a
four-color cover illustration. I was on-
ly given one other cover later on, but

some of the interior illustrations were
splendid. Bok illustrated a number of
my stories, and Finlay did three or
four.

I only remember really disliking
one illustration, done for “The Hor-
ror from the Hills.” The story has
this incredible entity, Chaugnar
Faugn, who looks a little like an
elephant, and it was actually depicted
as a real elephant standing on a
pedestal.

TZ: Many of the covers were painted
by Margaret Brundage, who was
famous for her scantily clad women
in distress.

Long: Yes. Lovecraft didn’t think
very highly of Mistress Brundage. He
didn’t like her nudes— but it did in-
crease circulation. There you have it:
fine stories and good illustrations
don’t increase the circulation, but
something very sensational on the
cover will boost sales, whether it has
artistic merit or not. Weird Tales
never tried to compete with the sex
magazines of the time, though, which
were considered to be very auda-
cious— Spicy Stories and magazines
like that. Both Robert E. Howard
and E. Hoffmann Price wrote for
several of them. I think a quarter of
a cent a word was all they ever paid.

Weird Tales had several levels of
readership. Some of the young
readers who were published in “The
Eyrie” [the letter column] were naive
indeed, but a much more mature au-
dience read WT as well, even in those
days. Now, of course, copies are col-
lected by university libraries.

TZ: We talked a little about Edwin
Baird. What can you recall of
J.C. Henneberger?

Long: His chief claim to fame was
the founding of College Humor. I
think at one time he dreamed of
becoming a very important popular
journalist, perhaps on the level of
Hearst. He had very big plans, I
remember, when he came to New
York. Lovecraft brought him to our
home once as a dinner guest, and
Bernarr McFadden’s name came up.
“I don’t really envy McFadden his
fame,” Henneberger said, “because it
came from cheap journalism, and I
like to think of myself as a little
above that.”

Actually, Henneberger was just
as much of a go-getter as McFadden,
but you’d never think it because he
was so quiet-spoken. He was in his

forties at the time— this must have
been about 1923, because it was
before I sold ny first story to Weird
Tales— and he was very ambitious, a
shrewd businessman. But he was also
very cultivated and read a great deal.

Henneberger had come from
Chicago to New York on that occa-
sion to raise money for his whole
publishing group. That was when he
tried to make Lovecraft editor. He
had tremendous admiration and )
respect for Howard, and would have
made him editor, but Howard
: wouldn’t go to Chicago. He said the
very thought of the slaughterhouses
was too much for him.

TZ: He could have commuted, of
course.

Long: And I told him that many
times. That’s what Sonia must have
told him also, because she would have
liked him to take the job. She was
very concerned about his inability to
find one in New York.

TZ: Of course you knew Lovecraft
and Sonia Greene before and after
they were married. Tell us a little
about their relationship. How did
they meet?

Long: I’m sure Howard was very im-
pressed by Sonia. It was almost a
love affair, insofar as he was capable
of a romantic attachment. She met
him through their shared amateur
journalism interests, at a convention
in Boston. She invited him to visit
her in New England, and he did so
two or three times. Then he was a
guest at her home on his first trip to
New York. There was nothing
physically romantic between them at
that time, I’m sure of that. When
they stayed at a town on the seacoast
together, they had separate rooms,
and so forth.

TZ: You met Lovecraft through cor-
respondence, didn’t you?

Long: Yes. I received what I suppose
could be called a fan letter from
Howard— if you keep in mind that
praise from a master to a beginner
sometimes sounds that way. He was
tremendously impressed by a Poe-
esque kind of short story that I wrote
for The United Amateur.- It was titled
“The Eye Above the Mantel.” I just
found a copy a few weeks ago, and
considering that I must have been
about eighteen when I wrote it, I
don’t think it’s too bad. It was a
story in poetic prose, heavily influ-
enced by Poe’s; “The Shadow” and

Photo by Deborah Wian

some of his other “fables,” as Poe
called them. In fact, I don’t know
that I could do that kind of thing
much better today.

Over the years, Lovecraft con-
tinued to encourage me. Not only did
we meet often in person, but he must
have written eight hundred to a thou-
sand letters to me across the years.
TZ: Many different writers have tried
to describe Lovecraf ;, but you knew
him perhaps better than anyone.
What was he really like?

Long: He was a very kindly disposed,
generous-minded human being who
was also a writer of creative genius.

One thing I would like to do is to
point out two fallacies that have ap-
peared in recent biographies. One is
that he was a schizoid. There was
nothing schizoid about Howard. He
met on an equal plane with all kinds
of people. He was absolutely at ease
in company. He enjoyed talking with
people. A schizoid is supposed to be
cold, unemotional, almost totally
detached. Howard was not as emo-
tional as a great many people, but I
can’t imagine any psychological
classification less typical of him. Un-
fortunately, you see, if you don’t
know a person, if you’ve never met
! him, you can’t judge him by his
l writings alone.

The other thing is that two or
three writers assume that Howard
was a very hard man to deal with,
very firm in his opinions and always
attempting to force them on others.
Nothing could be further from the
; truth! Howard could be easily per-
suaded to change his mind, and he
I never insisted that other people agree
! with him. In a recent interview, Man-
| ly Wade Wellman said he always
j wanted to get n touch with
Lovecraft but had never done so
j because he was afraid Howard would
1 have been too dogmatic and attempt
i to “lay down the law,” so to speak,
| in discussing literary and other mat-
; ters. Actually, that whole attitude
{ was entirely absent from Howard’s
: character.

Another characteristic of Howard
that perhaps I should mention is that
he was very slow to anger. He never
flew into furious rages. If someone
said something that angered him, or
made a thinly veiled verbal attack on
him, his voice could turn harsh and
cold, and he could give one the feel-
ing that it might be very dangerous

"What interests me most is the psychological factor, combinea with beauty
and mystery . . . Even in the most terrible horror story there can be elements
of strange beauty. "

to risk gambling on his capacity for
restraint.

I didn’t put all this in Dreamer on
the Nightside because you can’t in-
clude everything. But it’s really
tragic how these distortions of what a
great man is really like creep in years
after he dies. Anatole France said in
“Little Pierre” that he never wanted
to be famous because your biog-
raphers would slander you beyond
belief. And it’s true in the case of
Lovecraft. His emotional character
has been absolutely missed in most
of the commentaries. He had a great
gift of friendship, and those who
didn’t know him personally miss all
that. J

TZ: I seem to recall a visit to the*
Metropolitan Museum of Art that you
two made together.

Long: You mean the time we visited
the Egyptian tomb? Well, the
Metropolitan apparently still has it.

This was way back in the 1920s. The !
tomb was on the main floor in the j
Hall of Egyptian Antiquities, and we |
both went inside to the inner burial |
chamber. Howard was fascinated by j
the somberness of the whole thing. I
He put his hand against the cor- !
rugated stone wall, just casually, and
the next day he developed a pro- !
nounced but not too serious inflam- ;
mation. There was no great pain in- i
volved, and the swelling went down
in two or three days. But it seems as
if some malign, supernatural in-
fluence still lingered in the burial
chamber— The Curse of the Pharaohs ,
—as if they resented the fact that
Howard had entered this tomb and
touched the wall. Perhaps they had
singled him out because of his stories
and feared he was getting too close
to the Ancient Mysteries.

TZ: Lovecraft was famous for taking
long walks, not only around Pro- '

Frank Belknap Long

vidence, but in New York, too— some
of them lasting all night. Did you go
on any of these?

Long: I was a young student at New
York University, and I didn’t have a
chance to go on more than a fourth
or a fifth of them. Samuel Loveman,
Rheinhart Kleiner, George Kirk, and
two or three others accompanied him
more often. They’d start out in
Brooklyn and they’d wind up at the

felt he must get back to Providence.
He did become, in his last few
months in New York, terribly
neurotic, and he saw horrible
creatures everywhere— though not,
I’m sure, in a hallucinatory sense.
Nevertheless, he lost weight and he
looked terrible. My mother thought
he was on the verge of a disastrous
nervous breakdown and wrote a long
letter to his aunts saying she thought

"Howard liked to pretend
there were secret passages
beneath all unusual buildings,
passages filled with
monsters and decaying creatures r

tip of Manhattan, or even at the
northern extremity of the t island.
They’d take the subway, of course, to
get from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
They’d start off in Brooklyn Heights
and heaven knows where dawn would
find them.

Howard liked anything from the
eighteenth century and even the early
years of the nineteenth century, when
that colonial influence still survived. I
remember walking on Forty-Second
Street with him once, and he pointed
to the American Radiator Building
that towered close to the New York
Public Library on Fortieth Street as
an example of futuristic modern ar-
chitecture. It also had a kind of Dun-
sanian, dreamlike quality with its
black and gold rising against the sky.
Howard imagined secret passages
under it, as he did for all the
buildings he liked. He liked to pre-
tend there were secret passages
beneath all unusual buildings. You see
it in his stories, too, the old churches
of Providence and so forth. He’d say
that the passages were filled with
monsters and decaying creatures,
Innsmouth-type entities.

When he first came to New York,
Howard was totally fascinated by the
city and by all its historical aspects.
There was much that he later thought
was terrible, but nothing grated on
him at all in the first two or three
months. Gradually, though, when he
couldn’t find, a good position and
Sonia kept after him, he moved to
the Red Hook section of Brooklyn
and saw the terrible decadence. His
whole attitude changed after that. He

it might be better if he went back to
his beloved Providence. So return
home he did.

TZ: What is your favorite story of
his?

Long: From a purely artistic point of
view, I think my favorite is “The Col-
our Out of Space.” And after that,
“The Dunwich Horror” and “At the
Mountains of Madness.” I’m not quite
sure how high on the list he would
have placed “The Dunwich Horror”
himself. His evaluation of that story
changed from time to time.

TZ: We were talking earlier about
your own contributions to Weird
Tales. That wasn’t the only magazine
you sold to in those days, was it?
Long: Oh, no. At the so-called height
of the pulp era, I wrote for perhaps a
dozen magazines over a period of
several years. There were at least
thirty-five science fiction magazines
on the stands every month. I sold two
such stories to the Gernsback group
[owned by sf pioneer Hugo Gerns-
back, for whom the “Hugo” Award is
named] around 1927. The first, “The
Thought Machine,” appeared in
Wonder magazine— accompanied by a
pencil sketch that did not in the least
resemble me! Immediately afterward,
Gernsback sold the magazine to
another group. I haven’t read those
stories in years, but a fan resurrected
them a while ago and said he liked
them very much.

TZ: Didn’t you work for some of
these magazines later on as an
editor?

Long: Yes, I worked for Leo
Margulies, beginning in 1951 or 1952,

for about ten years. I started with
the group that included The Saint
and, after a couple of years there,
moved on to Renown Publications
and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

We had many visits from well-
known mystery writers at both
magazines. You’d be amazed how
many established writers were eager !
to appear in them. But we’d get some ]
very bad stories from some of the |
foremost writers in the field. It was
something of a revelation to me.

For a number of years, free-lance
writing was my sole means of sup-
port, but it does not always supply
the kind of income one needs. I’ve
been a free-lance writer most of my
life, but I enjoyed working for
Renown Publications, too. I took all
of the work home and edited it over
the weekend. And I also worked,
later on, for Short Stories— a revival
of a famous early pulp magazine that
was on the or der of Adventure— and
for another Renown publication,
Satellite Science Fiction. In all, I’ve
been associate editor of three dif-
ferent magazines.

TZ: Do you ever long for a return of
those old magazines?

Long: No, not really. In the main
their literary standards were not very
high, and at their best they were
miles below the standards set by
magazines like Harpers and Scrib-
ners. I’ve always thought that serious
literary standards cannot just be
brushed aside. The tragedy of it is
that, years ago, the so-called quality
magazines published weird stories
only very occasionally, so a writer ;
had no choice but to write for the
pulps. That’s changed today: weird
fiction is appearing in the quality
magazines quite frequently.

TZ: Do you suppose that writers like
Poe and Bierce, if they’d lived in the
1920s and 1930s, would have written
for magazines like Weird Tales?

Long: You ain’t project something
like that. You can’t imagine Poe
walking along the street and finding
the magazine so absorbing that he’d
immediately sit down and write for
it— but I think it would have appealed
to him and Bierce. Although Poe was
a major American literary figure—
and there is a certain irony involved
here— during his lifetime he wrote for
a number of magazines that were a
degree more pulpish than Weird
Tales and a dozen others I could

HPL photo from The Dunwich Horror and Others (Arkham House: Sauk City, Wisconsin)

name. Look at bis parody of
Blackwood’s. They were very crude.
Poe wrote for a number of magazines
that were distinctly immature from a
modern point of view. But he remains
a major literary figure despite all of
that.

TZ: Of course, things have changed
somewhat since then, but I wonder if
the pressure on writers isn’t still
pretty much the sarr e.

Long: It’s true. A brilliant young
writer today can achieve overwhelm-
ing overnight success, while another
| who might be just as accomplished!
j can almost starve to death. Young j
! writers can still go through a terrible j
| economic struggle. A bestselling 1
: paperback may fetch a third of ai
| million dollars, but that is only advan- j
; tageous to about one writer in a hun-j
dred, young or old. Leslie Fiedler!
made me very mad recently with an!
article in the New York Times Book
Review claiming that American j
writers of genius no longer had an!
economic struggle, but were j
guaranteed a fortune: in advance!

TZ: I think it’s amazing that people
survived as writers on the low rates
once paid for pulp fiction. They must
have written an enormous volume of
words.

Long: Yes, in the past there were
tremendous “pulp pants,” as they
called themselves. Arthur Burks, for
example, often made $10,000 in one
year. Raise no eyebrows, please. That
would be $70,000 to $80,000 today,
and a tremendous salary for someone
who was writing for not more than
two or, occasionally, three cents a
word.

There used to be, at the Somerset
Restaurant in Manhattan, a gathering
of the major pulp writers over which
Burks presided. Ren Hubbard [L.

■ Ron Hubbard, today best known as
i the founder of Scientology] was an;
| early member of the group. I
, remember he used to wear his Navy
| uniform to meetings. I brought
Lovecraft to a meeting once, and he
j was quite impressed with Hubbard,
asking, “Who is i;hat red-headed
young gentleman over there?”

I knew Cornell Woolrich quite
well, too. We met in 1957 when Leo
and Sylvia Margulies invited me to a
party at which he was present. I got
to know him fairly well in the next
couple of years, and sometimes
stopped by at his hotel on West

Both men wrote for Weird Tales and

other pulp magazines of the 1920s
and '30s.

Seventy-First Street for a chat.
“William Irish” was the pen name he
used for his most famous story, “The
Phantom Lady.” He was a most
remarkable writer, very shy and
unassertive in many ways. After his
mother died he went all to pieces.
When you met him at that time, you
couldn’t believe he was the same man
who had written Deadline at Dawn
and Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He
once told me he’d never seen Rear
Window.

Somehow, I never could reconcile
the difference between Woolrich and
his writing, and others who knew him
at the time have said the same thing.
This open, honest, sort of naive in-
dividual was so different from the
writer of genius who had produced
those stories that I have sometimes

thought that his mother, to whom he
was so attached, perhaps contributed
something to those early stories. He
appears with her on the dust jacket
of two of his books, and she was ap-
parently a very brilliant woman. I’ve
often wondered if she didn’t perhaps
write some of the stories, at least in
part. But that’s wholly a surmise.

I remember he was very upset
once that Hans Santesson had told
him to leave a meeting of the
Mystery Writers of America for
drinking too much. A fellow writer
had to guide him home. And when he
died he left a fortune of close to a
million dollars, which he bequeathed
to Columbia University. Yet he
always talked as if he were hard up
and afraid he wouldn’t sell his next

story.

TZ: For most writers, though, the
struggle to make ends meet is a real
one, as you pointed out before. But

for fantasy writers, things may at
last be looking up. Don’t you find
that the fantasy genre has gained ac-
ceptance as an important branch of
mainstream literature in the last few
years?

Long: I think genuine literature in j
any category has always been in the j
mainstream. Supernatural horror j
stories, the lighter kinds of fantasy,
science fiction— the best of it— all
these have always been in the
mainstream. Dickens wrote an entire
novel that was specter-haunted from
the first page to its still-unfinished
final chapters, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood. Wilkie Collins and Emily
Bronte also come instantly to mind.

If you go back a century or more, you !
find that the whole tradition of !
American and English literature has |
assigned to fantasy a very high role. 1
In America alone, Poe and
Hawthorne were predominantly
supernatural horror story writers,
even though the latter had other
strings to his bow. And there is a
wholly magical fantasy aspect of
Moby Dick— and even of Huckleberry
Finn— that would diminish their
splendor if removed.

TZ: What do you consider to be the
most important elements of a horror
story?

Long: Many elements are of the ut-
most importance. The feeling that
everything is not quite as it should
be, even when two young people are
playing tennis on a summer after-
noon— if that feeling can be conveyed
at the start, you’ll have scored at
least two out of seven or eight points.
The swift or slow buildup— there are
advantages in both— of a truly terrify-
ing atmosphere can take on a special
quality when it’s combined with first-
rate characterization.

Horror for me is almost in- j
separable from profound psycho- !
logical stress. Someone is in a terrible 1
spot because he’s done something
something dreadful in a “beyond the
pale” sense, or he possesses extraor- j
dinary endowments of one sort or ;
another. What penalty will he have to
pay? What will happen to him under
various unusual circumstances— often
of a totally destructive nature, and
not just on a physical plane?

Emotional fidelity is very impor-
tant. What interests me the most is
the psychological factor, combined
with beauty and mystery and

Photo by Deborah Wian

many different genres is certainly
legitimate.

TZ: What is the source of your in-
spiration?

Long: It’s hard to say what first
aroused my ir terest in that direction.
From a quite early age, ten or twelve
or so, I became interested in science
fiction novels. In those days they
were called “pseudo-science stories.’’
I wrote some science fiction at eight-
een or so, and it had a lot to do with
my childhood influences and my early
family environment and all the cir-
cumstances of my early life, which is
true of almost all writers. In my
youth I read a great deal of Wells
and Verne, and also adventure and
sea stories by Kipling, Conrad, and
others.

TZ: What abcut horror movies?
Long: Across the years I have pro-
bably attended about as many as the
average person, if not more. Largely
because it fascinates me from a
literary point of view, I’ve always felt
that the supernatural horror film is a
genre apart. In my early days I was
interested in the Boris Karloff
movies, some of which go back to
silent film days. In the last few years
I’ve viewed only the outstanding pro-
ductions, because I’ve been so busy
otherwise.

TZ: No midnight visits to

graveyards?

Long: No, no, no! I never had any
tendency to actually visit cemeteries.
I differed from HPL a great deal in
that respect. Graveyards have never
actually fascinated me. As a matter
of fact, they more or less depress me.
I’ve always avoided them as much as
possible.

TZ: Then what is the source of hor-
ror in your stories?

Long: The primary source of horror
is the simple fact that life is more
mysterious than we know, stranger
and more terrifying. There are dep-
ths of human experience . . . and to
some extent, of course, the horror
story can be a trivialization of that
experience. I have no great admira-
tion, say, for the story that actually
tries to make you feel that the con-
ventional devil is a reality.

TZ: You don’t believe in the devil?
Long: No, I’m afraid I don’t.

TZ: So what do you believe in as an
evil force?

Long: It’s very difficult to judge that.
You see, I’m convinced that some-
thing very vicious and terrible un-

" Supernatural horror stories, the lighter kinds of fantasy, science fiction—
the best of it— all these have always been in the mainstream . . . There is a
wholly magical fantasy aspect of Moby Dick, and even of Huckleberry
Finn, that would diminish their splendor if removed. "

strangeness. Even in the most terri-
j ble horror story there can be
elements of strange beauty. Rod Ser-
ling was brilliantly perceptive in his
■ handling of that aspect of the genre.
TZ: Do you find those same elements
; in stories being written today?

Long: Oh, yes. Many present-day
writers have greater maturity,
greater insight than the horror
writers of the 1920s or 1930s. I think
every powerful new writer who has
come along has contributed some-
thing new and important. Stephen
King, for example, has taken or-
dinary situations, situations that con-
front young people in, let us say, the
average American village, and has
dwelt in a totally naturalistic way on
how they act and react. He has made
all of this so realistic that when he in-
troduces an element of supernatural
horror, you wholly believe it.

Peter Straub is another new and

exceptionally gifted practitioner of
the genre. He has a genius for con-
juring up an unutterably chilling
atmosphere.

What Lovecraft contributed was
primarily a unique kind of “cos-
micism,” the sense of terrible alien
entities encroaching on mankind from
outer space. King, on the other hand,
has taken the average village, such as
his own town in Maine, or one in the
Midwest, and has introduced the
supernatural elements in close
association with everyday events in
the lives of his characters.

TZ: King has also added sexual can-
dor to the genre. Do you think that is
out of place in a supernatural horror
story?

Long: I don’t think very candid sex
should be introduced just to make a
story more popular. But if you
believe, as I do, that sex is central to
life’s deepest meaning, its inclusion in

doubtedly does exist. But beyond particular group of people I prefer to
that, we can only sj>eculate as to its see menaced or frightened. An idea
precise nature. It ms.y well be a whol- grips me, and it can happen to almost
ly anthropological development, with anyone.

no psychic or occult implications at TZ: Do you prefer to write short
all. stories or novels?

TZ: When you sit down to write a Long: I’ve written more novels than
story, where do you find that evil? In short stories in the last fifteen years
crowded cities? Old dark houses? or so. I find that more satisfying, in a
Graveyards? way. It’s also less of a strain. If you

Long: It depends on what sort of write one short story and sell it, you
story you’re writing. If you’re writing have to worry about the next sale,
one with a traditional “House of with no time lag in between.

Usher” background and you want to TZ: Have any of your stories been
bring that out, you write a different filmed or televised?
sort of story than when you’re con- Long: None have been filmed, though
fronting an encroachment from out of that could still happen, but several
time in a hideous, sanity-imperiling have been on radio and television. My
way-the Lovecraft sort of thing. If “Guest in the House”— not to be con-
you want to make the reader aware fused with the famous play of that
of the strangeness and beauty and name— was televised on The Outer
mystery of the ancient world— the Limits. Theodore Sturgeon had a lot
revival of some ancient myth, for in- to do with that. He liked the story
stance— you use a still different ap- very much and was extremely in-
proach. In the same way, there’s no fluential at ABC at the time. Another

Jacket design by Stephen E. Fabian for In Mayan Splendor, a recently published

collection of Long’s early poetry.

IR MRYRR
cpi.rnnm*

story, “The Black Druid,” was also
televised.

TZ: What have you been writing
lately?

Long: I’ve gone back to short story
writing for a spell, but I’ve also been
working on a novel for the last year
and a half, a new science fantasy
novel. And I’ve written a lot of
science fiction in the last two
decades— chiefly novels.

TZ: It’s interesting that so much of
your work is still in print, or back in
print, after so many years.

Long: Yes, many of my best
stories are currently in print. The re-
cent Zebra collection, Night Fear,
contains a number of stories from the
old magazines, but the title comes
from a story I wrote only a few years
ago. Some of my best work, including
both fantasy and horror, is in that
book. My Doubleday collection, The
Early Long, is now in print from
Jove, and another paperback collec-
tion will soon be forthcoming from
Berkley Books. The Rim of the
Unknown is also in paperback. All
three of these volumes appeared
about two years ago, and between
them contain perhaps three-quarters
of nfy best short story writing. The
Early Long also contains a con-
siderable amount of autobiographical
material, since I wrote an introduc-
tion to each story. Of course, my
three most recent Arkham House
books are still in print, too. The first
edition of The Rim of the Unknown is
available from Arkham House. So are
my memoir of Lovecraft, Dreamer on
the Nightside, and In Mayan Splen-
dor, a poetry collection. The last two
have never appeared in paperback.
TZ: In Mayan Splendor has some of
your best work in it. Since most of
our readers have probably not seen
the book, perhaps we could close with
something from it— a charming little
poem called “Prediction” that, .in a
mere eight lines, expresses many of
your feelings about life:

I do not think that I shall see
The moon, nor any linden tree,

Nor flaming orchards in the dawn
But that I’ll know they’re made for
me.

And I shall hold my goblet up
And drink the dizzy wine of kings,
And seek cool cheeks, and tingling
song

And all the gorgeous, golden
things. 10

Influencing the Hell
Out of Time
and Teresa Golowitz

by Parke Godwin

HE WAS A MOST UNLIKELY HERO: A HORNY YOUNG MAN
WITH AN OLD MAN'S SOUL AND THE DEVIL FOR A SIDEKICK!

T he first conscious shock after the coronary
was staring down at my own body huddled
on the floor by the piano. The next was the
fiftyish, harmless-looking, and total stranger help-
ing himself to my liquor. His cordial smile matched
the Brooks Brothers tailoring. An urbane Cecil
Kellaway toasting me with my own scotch.

“Cheers, Mr. Bluestone. Hope you don’t
mind.” »

I found what passed for a voice. “The hell I
don’t. Who are you, and— and what’s happened to
me?”

For all the portly bulk of obvious good living,
he moved lightly, settling in a Danish modern chair
to sip at his purloined drink. “Glenmorangie single
malt— one doesn’t find much of it in the States.
One: my friends call me ‘the Prince.’ Two: you’ve
just had your second and final heart attack.”

Right so far: my first was two seasons back,
just after finishing the score for Huey.

“You’ve made the big league.” The alleged
Prince gestured with his drink at my inert form;
rich gold links gleamed against snowy cuffs. “No
more diets, no more pills, backers’ auditions, or
critics. You’ve crossed over.”

I goggled at my corpulent residue. “Dead?”
“As Tutankhamen.”

At first blush, there didn’t seem much
change. My penthouse living room, the East River,
Roosevelt Island framed in the picture window with
late winter sun. My score on the piano with Ernie
Hammil’s new lyrics. My wife Sarah’s overpriced
and underdesigned furniture. Even the records I
was listening to after lunch: Pete Rugolo and Stan
Kenton, discs on the turntable, jackets on the shelf.
For difference— me, very dead at the worst time.

“It couldn’t wait? We open in two weeks, the
second act needs three new songs, and God gives
me this for tsouris?” I collapsed on the piano bench
as my mind did a double take. “Wait a minute.
Prince of what?”

His smile was too benign for the answer.
“Darkness— or light, it depends on the translation.
We do get deplorable press.”

I took his point, not very reassured. “I’m not
. . . under arrest or something?”

“Of course not.” He seemed to regard the
question as gauche.

“Will anyone come?”

“Why should they?”

“Well, what do I do? Where do I go?”

The Prince opened his arms to infinite
possibilities. “Where would you like to go? Before
you answer hastily—” He sipped his scotch, sighing
in savory judgment. “Oh, that is good. You see,
you’ve cut your spiritual teeth on misconceptions.
Good, bad, I’m in heaven, it’s pure hell, all of which
rather beg the distinction. We’re familiarly known
as Topside and Below Stairs.’

“Below Stairs.” I swallowed. “That’s hell?”

“Eternity is an attitude. Some say it looks
like Queens. You have free choice, Mr. Bluestone,
bounded only by imagination and your own will to
create— and that, for far too many, is living hell.
For you: carte blanche to the past, present, or
future. Though I did have some small personal
motive in dropping by.”

“I thought so.”

“Nonono. Not a collection but a request. We
adore your music Below Stairs. Now that you’re
eligible, we hoped you’d visit for as long as you like.
We’ve quite an art colony, hordes of theater folk.
Wilksey Booth would like to do a musical, and this
very night there’s a grand party at Petronius’s
house.”

Adventure was not my long suit. “Thanks just
the same. I’ll stay here.”

The Prince pursed his lips and frowned. “You
never liked unpleasant scenes. You won’t be found
until Sarah gets back from Miami, and by then not
even the air conditioning will help. There’s going to
be some abysmal grand guignol with the mortuary
men, a rubber bag, and your wife weeping buckets
into a handkerchief.”

Not likely. Sarah bought them at Bergdorfs,
Belgian lace. For me she’d use Kleenex— the story
of our marriage. We never even had. children. Sarah
was a real princess. Her only bedtime activities
were fighting and headaches. For grief, she’d be
spritzing the place with Air- Wick before they got
the rubber bagful of me down the elevator. On the
other hand, my last will and testament might get a

Illustration by Anna Rich

»»■'* • >v

7 *\

Influencing Teresa Golowitz

Bergdorfs hanky. The Actors Fund would see a
windfall. Sarah wouldn’t.

The Prince nudged delicately at the elbow of
my thoughts. “Pensive, Mr. Blaustein? It was
Blaustein once.”

“Not for thirty-five years. Didn’t look good on
a marquee.”

“No fibbing.”

“Okay. Four years in an upper-class
Washington high school. I used to dream I was a
tall blond Wasp. On bad days even an Arab.”

Memories and reasons dissolved to another
dusty but undimmed image. My Holy of Holies.
Mary Ellen Cosgrove, super-shiksa.

Wheat-blond hair brushed thick and shining in
a long pageboy, good legs, tight little boobs succinc-
tly defined by an expensive sweater, sorority pin
bobbling provocatively over the left one like Fay
Wray hanging from the Empire State Building. I
think my eyes really went from following the un-
dulations of her tush. She«was my first lust, aridly
unrequited, but I played the piano well enough to be
invited to all her Lambda Pi parties, Oscar Levant
among the Goldwyn Girls with weak, horn-rimmed
eyes, pimples, and factory-reject teeth. Not much
hope against jocks like Bob Bolling, who was born
in a toothpaste ad.

But I could dream; beside me, Portnoy was a
eunuch. My lust burned eternal in the secrecy of my
bedroom as, near nightly, I plowed a fistful of
ready, willing, and totally unliberated Mary Ellen
Cosgrove and panted to my pillow, Why don’t you
love me?

Because you’re a nebbish, my pillow said.

The Prince apparently read the thought; his
response was tinged with sympathy. “Yes. Mary
Ellen.”

“It’s been forty years. I don’t even know if
she’s still alive.”

“More or less.”

I was surprised to find how important it was.
Past, present, or future, the man said. Why not?

The Prince’s brows lifted in elegant question.
“A decision?”

“You won’t believe this.”

“Try me, I’m jaded.”

“I want to shtup Mary Ellen Cosgrove.”

His urbane tolerance palled to disappoint-
ment. “That’s all?”

“I’ve missed a lot of things in life. She was
the first, we’ll start there.”

“My talented friend: Faust, for all its en-
durance, is pure propaganda. I should have thought,
at the very least, an introduction to Mozart or
Bach-”

“Look, for bar mitzvah I got ten bucks and a
pen that leaked on white shirts. Now I’m dead. For
door prize you want me to klatch with harpsichord

players? Later with the music I want to ball Mary
Ellen Cosgrove.”

The Prince regarded me with cosmic
weariness, steepling manicured fingertips under his
chin. “I wonder. If memory serves, you last saw
this Nordic nymphet in graduation week, 1945.”

The growing eagerness made me tremble.
“What happened to her?”

“You really want to know?”

“Maybe she’s not a big deal after forty years,
bubby. But she was the first. That’s entitled.”

“Let me think.” The Prince leaned back, con-
centrating. “Cosgrove . . . From high school she
wafted to a correct junior college, married a correct
young man with a correctly Promising Future. Bob
Bolling.”

“I knew it! That horny bastard just wanted to
score. Not just her, anybody.”

“A fact Mr. Bolling belatedly appreciates; at
eighteen he considered himself in love when he only
needed to go to the bathroom. He spends less time
on his libido now than his gall bladder. Never-
theless, for his better days there is a pliant
secretary who understands on cue. Mary Ellen has
been relatively faithful.”

“Relatively?”

The Prince’s hands arced in graceful depreca-
tion. “The usual. First affair at forty when her
children were grown and no one seemed to need
her anymore. An aftermath of delicious guilt fol-
lowed by anticlimax when no one found out, and
one expensive face lift. The last liaison, predictably,
just after her younger daughter’s wedding.
‘Relatively,’ I say. She doesn’t care that much now.
Ennui is always safer than principles; it locks from
the inside. Currently into est, vodka, vague malaise
about the passage of time and what she imperfectly
recalls as her ‘golden, best years.’ There are
millions like her, Mr. Bluestone, perhaps billions.
She never found much in herself beyond what men
expected of her. For such people youth ought to be
bright. It’s their end.”

His voice, cultivated with overtones of Har-
vard and Westminster, carried all the ineffable
sadness of being alive, growing up, growing older.
But I knew what I wanted.

“Not Mary Ellen now, but then. A night in
October, 1944, the start of our senior year. There
was a party at her house.”

The Prince’s eyes flickered with new interest.
“Oh, yes. A fateful evening.”

“I kissed her. The first and only time.”

Memories like that stay with you. Somehow
she was in my arms, fabulous boobs and all, Fay
Wray enfolded by Kong Blaustein, and all futures
were possible. But I retreated into embarrassment;
in the middle of paradise, I thought of my bad teeth
and wondered if she noticed. “I blew it.”

Sixteen feels so different

from fifty-five.

A well of

nervous energy, health,
and fluttering insecurity
based on the hard certainty
that you’re the homeliest,
most unworthy and unwanted,
least redeemable schlemiel
in the universe.

God may love you,
but girls don’t.

“By an odd coincidence, the merest chance,”
the Prince said, “Teresa Golowitz was there that
night.”

“Who?”

“You don’t remember her? Nobody does. Sad
child, always faded into the wallpaper. Won’t you
say hello for me?”

Golowitz ... No, not a clue for memory. Old
acquaintance was definitely forgot. She would have
paled under the beacon of Mary Ellen, in any case.
“Will I be able to make it with her, change the way
things happened?”

“I certainly hope so,” the Prince purred, ris-
ing and making for the whiskey again. “If not
change, a definite influence.”

“Then I’m going to influence the hell out of

her.”

“I’m counting on it, Mr. Bluestone.” For an
instant I sensed more in his eyes than weary omni-
science. “Remember, you’ll be sixteen years old
with fifty-odd ye£.rs of experience. That’s not a
blessing. Perhaps you can make it one.”

Already in a fever to depart, I stopped,
agonized by a detail. “I don’t remember the exact
date.”

The Prince flourished like a banner headline.
“October 3, 1944! Paris liberated! Allied armies roll
across France! Binky Blaustein encircles la belle
Cosgrove! Why not take the bus for old time’s
sake?”

“It’ll be packed.”

“Weren’t they all then?” He raised the re-
filled glass to me. “Good hunting, Binky. And say
hello to Teresa.”

Again with Golowitz, when my soaring pur-
pose strained at the bit. “Who the hell is—?”

But the Prince, the room, and the year were

gone.

S ixteen feels so different from fifty-five. An
unsettling mix of fear and intoxication. A
well of nervous energy, health, and flutter-
ing insecurity based on the hard certainty that
you’re the homeliest, most unworthy and unwanted,
least redeemable schlemiel in the universe. God may
love you but girls don’t, and life is measured to that
painful priority.

Even after forty years I knew the route in my
sleep. From my father’s jewelry store down Four-
teenth Street to Eleventh and E. Catch the Walker
Chapel bus through Georgetown over Key Bridge
into Virginia, up Lee Highway ta Cherrydale and
Mary Ellen’s house on Military Road.

The bus pulled out at seven-ten; I’d be there
at seven forty-five. Just a little more than half an
hour! Dropping my real-silver Columbia dime into
the paybox, I quivered despite the double exposure
of age/youth, glowing with the joyful pain that
always churned my blood whenever I was going to
see her. It was beginning, would be as it was then
before time turned into nostalgia and faded both of
us into what passed for maturity.

The ancient bus was wartime-jammed with
tired government workers and young soldiers in
olive drab with shoulder patches no one remembers
now: ASTP, Washington Command, the Wolverine
Division, 7th Expeditionary Force. Baby-faced
sailors with fruit sala4 on their winter blues, pa-
tient and stoic Negroes in the still-Jim-Crowed back
seats. Two working housewives from the Govern-
ment Printing Office in upswept hairdos and
square-shouldered jackets, bitching about their
supervisors and the outlandish price of beef: you
wouldn’t need ration stamps soon, but sixty cents a
pound, who could pay that? Bad enough you
couldn’t get cigarettes now even if you ran a drug
store.

The bus lumbered up the spottily repaired
blacktop of Lee Highway toward Cherrydale. Grimy
windows and the outside dark made a passable mir-
ror to show me Richard Blaustein— Binky— in his
rumpled reversible box-coat from Woodward &
Lothrop. Bushy brown hair neither efficiently
combed nor recently cut, unformed mouth and chin
still blurred with baby fat. Not Caliban, not even
homely; merely embryonic. I winked at him from
forty years of forgiveness. Hey, kid, I fixed the
teeth.

Next to me in the crowded aisle, two sailors
compared the sultry charms of Veronica Lake with
an upstart pinup newcomer named Bacall. I felt diz-
zy, godlike. It’s October, 1944. Veronica Lake is
box office in four starring Paramount vehicles,
besides spawning the peekaboo hairstyle that gave
eyestrain to a million American girls. To Have and
Have Not isn’t released yet. I might be smoking my
hoarded Pinehursts with three fingers along the

Influencing Teresa Golowitz

butt like Bogart, but Lauren Bacall is just a lanky
new whosis named Betty Perske.

I looked closer at my mirror-Binky. The liquid
brown eyes behind the glasses were not completely
naive even then, wary-humorous with an ancient
wisdom not yet renamed Murphy’s Law. What can
go wrong will, but— a little patience, a little hope.
In four years we’ll raise our own flag over
Jerusalem; for the blacks in the rear of the bus, it’ll
be longer. Veronica Lake was a waitress before she
died. Bacall opened her second Broadway show in
1981. They were both nice girls, but Perske and me,
we lasted. Don’t ask: there are survivors and
others.

Cherrydale. I pulled the buzzer cord and
wormed through the press toward the rear door as
the bus slowed. It rattled open with a wheeze of
fatigued hydraulics, then I was out of the smell of
sweat, stale perfume, wool, and monoxide, standing
on the corner of Military Road under clear October
stars. »

“Oh, it’s you. Come in.”

Mary Ellen stood in the open door, one
slender hand on the knob, backed by music and
chatter. My Grail, the Ark of my libido’s own
Covenant— and yet different, a subtle gap between
my memory and the fact of her.

“Melly?”

“Well, don’t stare at me. Come in, hang up
your coat. Bo -ub!” And she was off paging Bob
Bolling. I hung my coat in the familiar closet and
stepped into the large living room. Smaller than I
remembered it. Gracious, comfortable chairs and
sofa, French doors at the rear leading to the yard,
Mason & Hamlin grand piano in the far corner.
Boys in trousers that seemed baggy and ill-cut to
me, girls in pleated skirts and bobby sox. And faces
I recalled with a pang: Bill Tait, Frankie Maguerra.
And willowy Laura Schuppe, always inches taller
than her escorts.

“It’s old Blaustein!”

And of course, Bob Bolling with his unwrin-
kled Arrow collar and hair that stayed combed. He
steered around two girls catting to a record of
Tommy Dorsey’s “Boogie Woogie,” stroking one on
the hips— “Shake it but don’t break it”— to tower
over me with an intimidating sunburst of thirty-two
straight teeth.

‘‘Big night, Blaustein,” he confided. “Melly’s
folks are away and I brought some grade-A hooch.
Bourbon, Blaustein.” He always pronounced it steen
despite my repeated corrections. He patted me on
the cowlick. “If you got a note from your mother, I
might put some in your Coke. Heh-heh. Come in the
kitchen.” He disappeared through the hall arch.

“Skip the bourbon.” The unsolicited advice
came from an owlish, bespectacled boy curled in a

chair with a thick book. “It’s g, gift from Mrs. Boll-
ing’s third cousin, a distant relative in the process
of retreating even further. Try the scotch.”

I edged over to him. A great disguise, but
there was no hiding those; velvet overtones.
“Prince?”

“Even he.” He turned a page and giggled. “I
love Paradise Lost. Milton gave me such marvelous
lines. The scotch is under the sink.”

The record ended; couples shuffled about,
awkward, faced with the need for conversation until
the music started again. Bill Tait bummed one of
my Pinehursts, and I took the first puff. They
tasted awful, but you couldn’t find real butts
anywhere. I segued to the kitchen in time to hear
Mary Ellen, coy, sibilant, and not really angry:

“Bob, now quit that! Honest, you’re all hands
tonight. Grab, grab.”

When they saw me, I felt only a phantom of
jealousy. “ ‘Scuse me. Thought I’d get a drink or
something.”

“Sure, Binky.” Mary Ellen switched her pert
tush to the icebox. “Coke or Pepsi? Bink, what are
you staring at? Coke or Pepsi?”

“Scotch, please.”

She made a face at me, strained patience.
“You don’t drink. Stop putting on.”

Bob whinnied. “Little man had a ha-a-rd

day?”

“You wouldn’t believe— the death of me.”

“Mama and Daddy don’t even drink scotch.”

“Under the sink.”

“See, smarty?” Mary Ellen yanked open the
cabinet door. Voila: Glenmorangie, the bottle col-
lared with a small handwritten tag: Against mixed
blessings.

“I never saw that.” She shrugged. “Anyway,
aspirin and Coke are your speed.”

The bottle looked like an oasis. “Ice?”

“Sure, it’s your funeral. Just don’t get sick on
the furniture.”

I dropped three ice cubes in a jigger with a
decent lack of haste, christened them with three fat
fingers of whiskey, and inhalec half of it in a gulp.
“Jesus, that’s good!”

“Don’t curse, Binky. And stop showing off."”

I winced in spite of myself at the sound of
that thin, plaintive voice. Once it must have been
aphrodisiac, especially when she sang. Now it mere-
ly grated.

“It’s good to see you again, Melly.”

“You drip, you saw me in school today.” She
peered closer at me. “But— gee, I don’t know— you
look different.”

“So do you.” It came cut flat and not too
gracious.

“Well, you don’t have to be so sad about it.
Bob, let’s go dance.”

T hat evidently concluded her obligations as a
hostess. Abandoned, I leaned against the
sink and watched that little ass, the center-
fold of a thousand steamy fantasies, bounce out of
the kitchen with Bolling in tow. Thank God for the
drink; the rest of me was deflating fast. Memory
was definitely suspect. I remembered her prettier,
even beautiful, and much more mature. She was as
unformed as myself. The eyes, to which I once
wrote saccharine verse, were merely blue with a
patina of intolerance over ignorance. The figure
was child-cute, but after thirty-five years of grown
women and a regiment of Broadway dancers, it
retreated now as the half-realized first draft of an
ordinary, mesomorphic female body. So far from a
resurgence of passion, I felt more pity and
understanding than anything else, like suffering the
gauche sophistication of a daughter struggling to be
grown-up. The idea of sleeping with Melly was more
than absurd, even faintly incestuous. My overblown
lust went flat as a bride’s biscuit, and from the
shadows of Shubert Alley I heard the mournful
laughter of Rick Bluestone, who would never call a
spade a heart. Mary Ellen Cosgrove at sixteen was
interesting as a clam. But then, so was I.

More kids arrived, conversation got louder,
high and giddy on youth alone. Melly and Bob
danced with glum precision. Suffering from total
recall, Frankie M&guerra regaled anyone in earshot
with Hope-Crosby jokes from The Road to Morocco.
My bookish buddy had vanished, but Laura
Schuppe, over at the piano, gave me an X-rated
wink and a little beckoning toss of her head. I
joined her on the bench.

“Find the scotch?”

“Huh? Yeah. Where’s the little guy who was
| sitting over there!’”

“Nelson Baxley, class of ’46. Korea, Bronze
Star and Purple Heart. Later: television production,
five children, one Emmy, one duodenal ulcer.”

I might have known. Laura would never even
look at me, let alone wink. “Prince?”

“Nelson left, so I borrowed Laura.”

“It doesn’t bother her, having you in
residence?”

“No, it’s all rather split-screen. On her side
she’s drooling over that varsity jock in the maroon
sweater. Nice girl, somewhat confused, poor self-
image. Top model for Vogue and Harper's, 1949-55.
One therapist, two nervous breakdowns, serial af-
fairs with lovers of mixed gender. Cocaine, anorex-
ia, born-again Christianity. Married a fundamen-
talist; currently works for the - Moral Majority.
Depressing. And Mary Ellen?”

“The booze is better. Thanks.”

Laura sighed with a wisdom eons beyond her.
“Nostalgia is always myopic. By the way, there’s
Miss Golowitz: trying to be invisible as usual.”

Even as I recognized and remembered the fat,
homely girl, my older heart went out to her. Teresa
Golowitz— a dark, shapeless smudge among blondish
altos in the school choral section. Coarse, frizzy
hair, unplucked eyebrows that aspired to meet over
her nose, and a faint but discernible mustache line.
Thick legs blotched with unshaved hair under lad-
dered nylons, and— insult to injury— a dress that
would look better on Aunt Jemima. Among the
relatively svelte Lamda Pi girls, she fit in like pork
chops at a seder. I, wondered why she’d been
invited.

“That’s why,” the Prince read my thought
casually. “Cast your mind back: Mary Ellen always
had a few plain girls around to make her look good.
And tonight is Teresa’s turn in the barrel.”

Memory sharpened to cruel clarity. My own
family was conservative enough, but Teresa’s or-
thodox parents made mine look like atheists. She
came to school in grandma dresses and no makeup.
She’d done her face for the party, no doubt on the
bus in a bad light. I watched Teresa trying to press
herself through the wall, fiddling with her hands,
carmined mouth frozen in a stiff smile. I always
avoided her in school; she was all the things I
wanted to escape. Now I could see how much she
might have wanted it, too.

“You’re big on futures, Prince. What hap-
pened to her?” Two to one she married the kind of
guy who wears his yarmulka to the office.

“Don’t you remember?”

“Memory I’m learning not to trust.”

“She committed suicide.”

“No! She didn— ” But in the breath of denial I
knew it was true, a sensation at school for a day or
two. When Frankie Maguerra told me, I said
something like “Gee!” and briefly pondered the in-
tangibles of life before getting on with adolescence.

“When?”

- “Tonight.”

Influencing Teresa Golowitz

Yes ... it was just about this month. The
Prince stroked soft chords with Laura’s long fin-
gers. “Took the bus back to town reflecting on
accumulated griefs and loneliness, and the fact that
no one at this golden gathering even said hello to
her, not even Blaustein. She got off the bus and
waited at the curb— as she is now, tearing at her
cuticles, multiplying this night by so many others
and so many more to come. She didn’t like the
product. When the next bus came along— behind
schedule and traveling too fast— she stepped in
front of it.”

I shook my head, foggily mournful. “What a
sad waste.”

“Sad but academic.” The Prince stood up.
“Excuse me, Laura 1 has to go to the little girls’
room. Had the immortal embrace yet?”

“No. Who needs it?”

Dismally true; the whole purpose of my flash-
back was on the cutting room floor. I was pon-
dering whether to talk to Theresa or just leave now
when Bill Tait roared away from a dirty-joke ses-
sion to drape himself over the piano. “Bink! Give us
‘Boogie Woogie.’ ”

“No!” someone else demanded. Do “ ‘Blue
Lights.’ ”

“Hey, Bink’s gonna play.”

“Yay!”

I swung into “House of Blue Lights” to a
chorus of squealed approval. It sounded fantastic,
too good, until I realized I was playing with forty-
five years of practice behind me and basic ideas still
unknown outside of Fifty-second Street: steel
rhythm under a velvet touch, block chords out of
Monk, Powell, and Kenton that wouldn’t be heard
for years yet. The crowd began to collect around
the piano. Mary' Ellen got set to sing, her big thing
at parties. Teresa Golowitz edged in next to her,
almost apologetically, pudgy fingers dancing on the
piano top. Melly took the vocal on the second verse;
not a bad voice, but it wouldn’t go past the fifth
row without a mike.

Fall in there, where the blue light’s lit,

Down at the house, the House of Blue Lights.

And then I heard it, rising over Mary Ellen’s
sweet, whitish soprano like a great big bird, that
smoky alto soaring into the obligato release. Yah-
duh - dee - duh - DAH - duh - duh - duh - DEE - dah - dah ,
bouncing twice around the electrified room and
sliding back into the lyric like she was bom there.
The hair rose on my head and arms; everyone
stared at Teresa Golowitz who, perhaps for the first
time and on the last night of her life, had decided to
leave her mark. I. rocked into another coda for her
alone, begging.

“Take it, girl!”

Teresa did; together we worked things on

that basic boogie that weren’t; invented yet. And
what a voice— not pure, not classical, but a natural
for jazz. Teresa straightened out of her usual
slump, closed her eyes, and let; the good riffs roll.
Sixteen years old; you could teach her a little about
phrasing and breath control, but the instrument
was incredible. She played with the notes, slurring
over and under the melodic line with a pitch and
rhythm you couldn’t break with dynamite. All the
greats had this for openers: Lutcher, Fitzgerald,
Stafford, June Christy, Sassy Vaughn, all of them.
Under the excitement, the Prince’s voice whispered
into my mind: Of course she’s beautiful. It’s her
requiem.

It could well be. When we finished the number,
I bounced up and smeared her lipstick with an off-
center kiss. “Baby, you’re gorgeous. Don’t ever think
you’re not.”

“Hey, lookit old Blaustein the wolf!”

Mary Ellen snickered; as a vocalist her nose
was a little out of joint— say about a mile. “Oh, it’s
a love match!”

Teresa blushed crimson; I doubt if she was
kissed much at home, let alone at parties. She
started to retreat, but I grabbed her hand. “Don’t
go, I need you. You know ‘Opus One’?”

She hesitated, then made her decision. She
glared with fierce pride at Mary Ellen and stood
even straighter. “Hit it, Blaustein.”

I zapped into the machine-gun opening with
pure joy. “Opus One” is a mal catting number.
Most of the kids started to dar ce, the rest jiggling
and beating time on the piano top. From Teresa, we
hadn’t heard anything yet. She vocalized the
soprano sax break from the Dorsey orchestration
with a scatty-doo riff that wailed like Nellie
Lutcher’s “Lake Charles.” She shouldn’t end like
this. In four years or less there’d be recording tech-
niques able to put that voice on the moon, and she
wants to off herself in an hour or two. The hell with
it all, if I could just keep her from that.

We rolled up the wall-shaking finish, both of
us out of breath. Teresa parked herself on the
bench beside me, guzzling sloppily at her drink.
“You are reet, Blaustein. You are definitely a
groove.”

“Me! Where’d you pick up jazz like that?”

“Who picks up? You feel it. The first time is
like remembering.”

“Feeling good, Terri?”

“Yeah, kinda.” She grinned shyly. “I always
wanted to be called that.”

“Terri it is. And take advice: tomorrow we
start working together.”

Her eyes clouded. “Tomorrow ...”

“Unless you're not around, you know what I
mean? Go home, take a shvitz. Tomorrow things

The hair rose
on my head and arms.
Everyone stared
at Teresa Golowitz
who, perhaps for
the first time and
on the last night
of her life,
had decided
to leave her mark.

will look pure gold. And when I call New York
about you—”

I talked fast, promising, conning, cajoling,
speaking of agents and record producers not even
born yet, anything to get her mind off the loser
track and that fatEil bus. Still talking, I steered her
into the kitchen, spiked her a little Pepsi in a lot of
bourbon, a new scotch for me. I’d bomb the suicide
out of her if I could, sing it out: one hour when she
and everybody in range knew Teresa Golowitz was
a person, a talent, and worth the future.

We were literally dragged back to the piano.
Play more. Sing, Teresa. Please sing, Teresa. She
didn’t know how to handle it all, never opened up
like this before. I ruffled a big fanfare chord on
the piano.

“Ladies and gentlemen— the fourteen karats
of Miss Terri Gold!”

“Yay!”

“Huh?” said Teresa. “What’s with Gold?”

“Just like Blaustein. I yell ‘Golowitz!’— who’d
come? Hang on, Terri. We are going to the moon.”

I launched ir to music so far beyond eight-to-
the-bar that the kids were mystified. Way-out
Monk, Shearing riffs, Charlie Ventura stuff, bop
sounds most of the world hadn’t heard yet, like
“The Man from Minton's” and the clean, hard-
rocking Previn-Manne “I Could Have Danced All
Night,” still twelve years in the future. Terri’s eyes
were moons of discovery before she dug it. Like she
said, a kind of remembering. On “To Be or Not
to Bop,” she came! in with her own obligato, sure
and pure.

“Hey, Bink,” Frankie Maguerra wondered.
“What is that?”

Terri didn’t need the name. She knew. I
dropped the beat and backed her with light chords
in implied time. She was pure gold; with a little
grooming she could play clubs now, but she had to
live for that. For the other kids, it was too far out;
they needed a beat. Teresa yearned visibly after
Bob Bolling, who left the living room hand in hand

with Mary Ellen. I saw her glow fade back to the
one-minute- to-zotz look she had before singing. Sad-
ly she glanced at the clock.

“Terri, you want to try a ballad?”

“Gee, I don’t know. It’s late.”

“One ballad. Name it. You got a favorite?”

“Do you know ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’?”

“Does Burns know Allen?” I rippled out a
four-bar intro. “Fly, baby. The sky is yours.”

Terri closed her eyes, lifted her head, and
sang. The room grew a little quieter. It’s a great
old number, an evergreen from an early Sinatra
film that you can still hear on FM in New York. All
right, critical? Teresa wasn’t as sharp on slow
ballads, not the best phrasing, a little wobbly on
drawn-out vowels, but her feeling for the arc and
sense of lyric was sure and solid. The kids were
very quiet now; she had them in the palm of her
hand. Then she did something that curled my hair:
ended one phrase softly and, on the same breath,
swelled into the first word of the next with a gor-
geous crescendo I felt down to my socks.

I’ve auditioned a thousand singers. You can
hear their technique and training in the first line.
What Golowitz had no one can teach. I heard her
plain in that short phrase, locked in with a soul full
of schmerz and one slender lifeline of music. A
homely girl, a fat loser in the svelte Rita Hayworth
era; anyone could hurt her and everyone would, but
when she sang it would all be on the line, bare and
beautiful. A voice you listened to because it was
your own. A smoky, black coffee, tapped-out-and-
running-on-guts sound you don’t hear anymore
unless you own some of the old Billie Holiday sides.
Or another voice, quite different but as full of life
and pain, that will pack the Palace Theater twenty
years from tonight with the same self-lacerating
magic in every song. A miracle called Garland.

We finished the song. The kids drifted away,
liking but not really understanding what they’d
heard, ready for the record player and more grab-
ass to music. Teresa looked again at the mantel
clock.

“I gotta go. It’s late.”

“See me tomorrow, Terri?”

“I don’t know ...”

“Promise.”

“Blaustein, don’t ask. There’s a lot of
problems.”

“Work with me. There’s people in New
York-”

“Don’t put on,” she said hopelessly. “You
don’t know from New York.”

“Promise me, damn it.”

“Why?” It was a wail, a cry for help. Already
in it you could hear the gray decision, a door clos-
ing in Losersville. What I answered wasn’t from

Influencing Teresa Golowitz

sixteen. I wondered if sixteen could dig it.

“I know from New York and a lot of things.
Don’t blow it, Terri. You got more to give in thirty-
two bars than most people find in a lifetime. You
want to be loved? So does the world. They’ll love
you, Terri. They’ll beat your goddam door down.
But it takes time and paying your dues and maybe
a little trust. So see me tomorrow and we start.”

Teresa tried to smooth the crushed material
of her dress over shapeless hips. “Blaustein— you’re
such a noodge." She said it like a kiss. “G’night.”

I tried to follow her, but a rather strong in-
fluence glued me to the piano bench. You’ve done
your best, Mr. B. Now a little trust.

So I sat there guzzling scotch too fast, which
was a mistake. Bluestone could guzzle, Binky
couldn’t. I took a few deep breaths and watched
Frankie Maguerra dance with Laura Schuppe
through the wrong end of a telescope, then wobbled
upstairs to the bathroom, wondering if I’d be sick.
Apparently there was enough Bluestone ballast to
hold it down. After a few moments glumly ponder-
ing the toilet depths, I scrubbed my face with a
washcloth and grinned farewell to Binky.

“See you at Sardi’s, kid.”

Wavering toward the stairs, I heard Mary
Ellen’s voice from behind a half-closed door: “Day-
amn, Bob! I said stop."

“For God’s sake, what’s the matter now? On,
off. You’.re a real tease, you know that?”

I pushed in the door and leaned against the
jamb. They didn’t see me, sitting stiff and apart on
the edge of the bed. Melly looked confused and
angry.

“You don’t have to be so crude about it.”

“Oh ... shit.”

“And don’t talk to me like that.”

Poor Bob: eighteen, all balls, and no finesse.
He even rated a twinge of sympathy. “Hey, stud,”
I said, “why not try a little conversation first?”

Mary Ellen whirled and stiffened. Bob only
looked annoyed. “Blaustein, blow. Get out of here.”

I felt booze-brave. “Better idea, schmuck.
Why don’t you go get started on your gall bladder.”

“Listen, you—”

“Oh, he’s right!” Mary Ellen screeched. “Go
home. Go home, you’re disgusting.”

Confused, outgunned, Bob threw her one clas-
sic grimace of exasperation. “All riqht. But I won’t
be back.”

“Bet?” I offered as he pushed past me and
clumped down the stairs.

“What a jerk.” Melly collapsed in a frustrated
bundle. “I don’t care if he never comes back. I
wouldn’t see him again if he was the last man on
earth.”

“Sure you will.” Because for you, he is. That
was less of a future than an epitaph. The whole

thing was vaguely sad. I wanted to go.

“God.” Her shoulders began to shake. “I’m
surrounded with drips.”

I put my arm around the forlorn, half-grown
lump of her uncertainty: more experienced than her
mother would imagine and a lot less than she
thought. Sixteen, the voice of the turtle bellowing
in her blood, wanting all the things she couldn’t
handle yet, and all she had were the cards girls got
dealt in 1944. Unless you were a freak genius or
something, you got married. You got a man. There
wasn’t anything else; not for mommy, not for you.
Later it might be easy, now it was hell. Only idiots
want to be young again. It’s a miserable gauntlet to
run, but looking back later, Melly would block out
the insecurity and pain until only the glow was left
to shimmer in soft focus, and her picture would be
no more accurate than mine.

“Take it one day at a time, Melly. It’s more
fun that way.”

She wilted against my shoulder. “Binky, are
you my really truly close friend?”

“Guess I am.” I pulled her gently to her feet.
Her lips found my cheek and then my own mouth.
A very split-screen moment: enjoyment, regrets,
and a fleeting taste of what it would have been to
have a daughter. I might have been good at that.

“You’re nice, Bink. Just sometimes you’re a
jerk. You going home?”

“Time to go.”

“See you in school.”

“S’long, Melly. It was a swell party.”

Wrestling into my coat downstairs, I peeked
once more into the living room, at the kids I grew
up with. A damned fool, happy and sad, high on life
more than anything else, I ducked for the front
door before they caught me crying. But someone
did.

“Hey, Blaustein!”

Teresa Golowitz swayed precariously in the
kitchen hallway, flashing a fresh drink and a bleary
grin. “Hu-hi!”

“Terri! I thought—”

“Ah, hu-hell,” she gulped. “I felt so good
from singing, I figured one more for the road. I
have just two questions for you.”

“You didn’t go. You didn’t-”

“Don’t change the su-subject. First: what c’n
I do for hu-hiccups?”

“Hold your breath and take nine sips of
water.”

“And the big qu-uk-question,” said Teresa
Golowitz. “What time tomorrow?”

“I’ll find you.” Gloriously smashed, she
couldn’t see the tears start. “Come on, how about
we take the same bus?”

Terri was still grinning and hiccupping when
the scene cut.

M y penthouse was still there, but with a few
major changes. On the floor, Rick Blue-
stone was beginning to wilt like leftover
salad. The record jackets near the turntable were
different, but still classics of their kind. Stan Ken-
ton had metamorphosed to Kenton Digs Gold. The
Pete Rugolo album was titled simply Pure Gold and
Rugolo. Beside them lay a third: Gold Sings Blue-
stone Plays Gold. On the wall just above the piano
was a photograph of that vulnerable, indestructible
head lifted, the mouth parted in a lyric. I remem-
bered it with hiccups and much, much younger.

A lot of change, a lot of years. Some great
songs.

Across the back of the album we cut together,
she’d scrawled in a looping hand: Blaustein, you’re
such a noodge— Terri Gold loves you.

The Prince rose and straightened his Sulka
tie. “Whither away, Mr. Bluestone?”

I turned once more to the window. After
thirty-five years of looking at Manhattan, the river,
and Queens, I wouldn’t miss them all that much.
As for Sarah, don’t ask. With any luck she’d be out
of Air-Wick. “Topside, I suppose. Poppa will
expect me.”

A nuance of mild discomfort shaded the
Prince’s savoir-faire. “Not just yet, Pm afraid.”
“Why not? You said anywhere.”

“Of course— in time. And time is what we
have perverted, not to say brutalized. You won’t be
welcome just now, I regret to say.” He didn’t sound
regretful at all, more like a sweepstakes winner.
“You’ve played merry hob with the Grand Scheme.
Terri Gold: three husbands, four children, three
grandchildren, six million-seller records, and a
career that threatens never to end-all from a girl
who was supposed to be a statistic at sixteen.
Where Topside is concerned, it’s best we maintain a
very low profile uritil — ”

“We?” I rounded on him in a chill of realiza-
tion. “We?”

“You, me, what’s the difference?”

“ That’s why you were all the time with Golo-

witz. You knew! You bastard, you knew all the
time!”

He nodded in modest pleasure. “As the lyric
goes, it had to be you. Of all that nebulous crew at
the party, you were the first slated to die after
Teresa. And the best bet. I field the shots, I don’t
call them.”

The immensity of it collapsed me on the sofa,
gaping. “You gonif. So you just waited until I
packed it in and—”

“Influenced.” The Prince capped it with a
satisfied smile. “I’m an artist like yourself, a
sculptor of possibilities. What could you change
with Mary Ellen, who was cast and immutable by
the age of ten?”

I stared at him, unbelieving. “Dead one day
and already I need a lawyer.”

“And you shall have the best,” the Prince
conciliated. “For services rendered. Darrow loves
cases like this.”

“I’ll bet. No wonder you get lousy reviews
Topside.”

“Topside!” he flared in disgust. “Stodgy,
pragmatic conservatives. Liszt should die of fever
before he’s thirty, Schubert before he could write
the glorious Ninth? Never! It’s not all fun, believe
me. Win some, lose some. Lose a Shelley, lose a
Byron, a Kapell. Lose a Radriquet before he’s
twenty-five, a Gershwin at thirty-nine. But a Terri
Gold at sixteen? No, the world is threadbare
enough. And no one Topside, not even my celestial
Brother— the white sheep of an otherwise brilliant
family— has ever understood the concept of creative
history. What in the cosmos does it matter if I
make a mess of their records? I create! Like any
artist, I need to be recognized. I need to be under-
stood. Most of all,” the Prince concluded wearily,
“I need another drink.”

I didn’t understand half of it, but— you know?
—I couldn’t really stay mad at him. Whatever else,
bad press or no, the guy has chutzpah. And there
are all those years of Terri Gold.

“How long has Terri got?”

“Ages, Mr. Bluestone. Dogs’ years. More
records, more men, more grandchildren. She’ll be
roaring drunk when she goes and happy as a bee
among flowers. And the last drink will be her best.”
The Prince polished off his own, neat. “Shall we?”

“Uh . . . where to?”

“As advertised: your choice. But till the
heat’s off, I’d suggest Petronius’s party. There’s
someone positively seething to meet you, that
clever little woman from the Algonquin set. Which
reminds me.”

The Prince swept up the Glenmorangie in one
protective arm, the other through mine. “Dottie
said to bring you and the scotch. Allons, Mr. Blue-
stone. The night is young!” iS

Miss Mouse
and the

Fourth Dimension

Robert ^Sheckley

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A WOMANS"
ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S RAISED TO A POWER OF FOUR!

I first met Charles Foster at the Claerston
Award dinner at Leadbeater’s Hall in the
Strand. It was my second night in London. I
had come to England with the hope of signing some
new authors for my list. I am Max Seidel, publisher
of Manjusri Books. We are a small, esoteric
publishing company operatfhg out of Lin wood, New
Jersey— just me and Miss Thompson, my assistant.
My books sell well to the small but faithful portion
of the population interested in spiritualism, out-of-
body experiences, Atlantis, flying saucers, and New
Age technology. Charles Foster was one of the men
I had come to meet.

Pam Devore, our British sales representative,
pointed Foster out to me. I saw a tall, good-looking
man in his middle thirties, with a great mane of
reddish blond hair, talking animatedly with two
dowager types. Sitting beside him, listening intent-
ly, was a small woman in her late twenties with
neat, plain features and fine chestnut hair.

“Is that his wife?” I asked.

Pam laughed. “Goodness, no! Charles is too
fond of women to actually marry one. That’s Miss
Mouse.”

“Is ‘Mouse’ an English name?”

“It’s just Charles’s nickname for her. Actual-
ly, she’s not very mouselike at all. Marmoset might
be more like it, or even wolverine. She’s Mimi
Royce, a society photographer. She’s quite well off
—the Royce textile mills in Lancashire, you know—
and she adores Charles, poor thing.”

“He does seem to be an attractive man,” I

said.

“I suppose so,” Pam said, “if you like the
type.” She glanced at me to see how I was taking
that, then laughed when she saw my expression.

“Yes, I am rather prejudiced,” she confessed.
“Charles used to be rather interested in me until he
found his own true love.”

“Who was-?”

“Himself, of course. Come, let me introduce

you.”

Foster knew about Manjusri Books and was

interested in publishing with us. He thought we
might be a good showcase for his talents, especially
since Paracelsus Press had done so poorly with his
last, Journey Through the Eye of the Tiger. There
was something open and boyish about Foster. He
spoke in a high, clear English voice that conjured
up in me a vision of punting on the Thames on a
misty autumn day.

Charles was the sort of esoteric writer who
goes out and has adventures and then writes them
up in a portentous style. His search was for— well,
what shall I call it? The Beyond? The Occult? The
Interface? Twenty years in this business and I still
don’t know how to describe, in one simple phrase,
the sort of book I publish. Charles Foster’s last
book had dealt with three months he had spent with
a Baluchistani dervish in the desert of Kush under
incredibly austere conditions. What had he gotten
out of it? A direct though fleeting knowledge of the
indivisible oneness of things, a sense of the mystery
and grandeur of existence .... In short, the usual
thing. And he had gotten a bock out of it; and that,
too, is the usual thing.

W e set up a lunch for the next day. I rented
a car and drove to Charles’s house in
Oxfordshire. It was a beautiful old thatch-
roofed building set in the middle of five acres of
rolling countryside. It was called Sepoy Cottage,
despite the fact that it had five bedrooms and three
parlors. It didn’t actually belong to Charles, as he
told me immediately. It belonged to Mimi Royce.

“But she lets me use it whenever I like,” he
said. “Mouse is such a dear.” He smiled like a well-
bred child talking about his favorite aunt. “She’s so
interested in one’s little adventures, one’s trips
along the interface between reality and the inef-
fable .... Insists on typing up my manuscripts just
for the pleasure it gives her to read them first.”

“That is lucky,” I said, “typing rates being
what they are these days.”

Just then Mimi came in with tea. Foster re-
garded her with bland indifference. Either he was
unaware of her obvious adoration of him, or he

Illustration by Marty Blake

1m*

»l§®

VwSi"-* TrM

Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension

chose not to acknowledge it. Mimi, for her part, did
not seem to mind. I assumed that I was seeing a
display of the British National Style in affairs of the
heart— subdued, muffled, unobtrusive. She went
away after serving us, and Charles and I talked
auras and ley-lines for a while, then got down to
the topic of real interest to us both— his next book.

“It’s going to be a bit unusual,” he told me,
leaning back and templing his fingers.

“Another spiritual adventure?” I asked.
“What will it be about?”

“Guess!” he said.

“Let’s see. Are you by any chance going to
Machu Picchu to check out the recent reports of
spaceship landings?”

He shook his head. “Elton Travis is already
covering it for Mystic Revelations Press. No, my
next adventure will take place right here in Sepoy
Cottage.”

“Have you discovered a ghost or poltergeist
here?” *

“Nothing so mundane.”

“Then I really have no idea,” I told him.

“What I propose,” Foster said, “is to create
an opening into the unknown right here in Sepoy
Cottage, and to journey through it into the unimag-
inable. And then, of course, to write up what I’ve
found there.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Are you familiar with Von Helmholtz’s
work?”

“Was he the one who read tarot cards for
Frederick the Great?”

“No, that was Manfried Von Helmholtz. I am
referring to Wilhelm, a famous mathematician and
scientist in the nineteenth century. He maintained
that it was theoretically possible to see directly into
the fourth dimension.”

I turned the concept over in my mind. It
didn’t do much for me.

“This ‘fourth dimension’ to which he refers,”
Foster went on, “is synonymous with the spiritual
or aethereal realm of the mystics. The name of the
place changes with the times, but the region itself is
unchanging.”

I nodded. Despite myself, I am a believer.
That’s what brought me into this line of work. But
I also know that illusion and self-deception are the
rule in these matters rather than the exception.

“But this spirit realm or fourth dimension,”
Foster went on, “is also our everyday reality.
Spirits surround us. They move through that
strange realm which Von Helmholtz called the
fourth dimension. Normally they can’t be seen.”

It sounded to me like Foster was extemporiz-
ing the first chapter of his book. Still, I didn’t inter-
rupt.

“Our eyes are blinded by everyday reality.

But there are techniques by means of which we can
train ourselves to see what else is there. Do you
know about Hinton’s cubes? Hinton is mentioned by
Martin Gardner in Mathematical Carnival. Charles
Howard Hinton was an eccentric American mathe-
matician who, around 1910, came up with a scheme
for learning how to visualize a tesseract, also called
a hypercube or four-dimensional square. His tech-
nique involved colored cubes which fit together to
form a single master cube. Hinton felt that one
could learn to see the separate colored cubes in the
mind, and then, mentally, to manipulate and rotate
them, fold them into and out of the greater cube
shape, and to do this faster ancl faster until at last a
gestalt forms and the hypercube springs forth
miraculously in your mind.”

He paused. “Hinton said that it was a hell of
a lot of work. And .later investigators, according to
Gardner, have warned of psychic dangers even in
attempting something like this.”

“It sounds like it could drive you crazy,” I

said.

“Some of those investigators did wig,” he ad-
mitted cheerfully. “But that might have been from
frustration. Hinton’s procedure demands an inhu-
man power of concentration. Only a master of yoga
could be expected to possess that.”

“Such as yourself?”

“My dear fellow, I can barely remember what
I’ve just read in the newspaper. Luckily, concentra-
tion is not the only path into the unknown. Fas-
cination can more easily lead us to the mystic path.
Hinton’s principle is sound, but it needs to be com-
bined with Aquarian Age technology to make it
work. That is what I have done.”

He led me into the next room. There, on a
low table, was what I took at first to be a piece of
modernistic sculpture. It had a base of cast iron. A
central shaft came up through its middle, and on
top of the shaft was a sphere about the size of a
human head. Radiating in all directions from the
sphere were lucite rods. At the end of each rod was
a cube. The whole contraption looked like a cubist
porcupine with blocks stuck to the end of his spines.

Then I saw that the blocks had images or
signs painted on their faces. There were Sanskrit,
Hebrew, and Arabic letters, Freemason and Egyp-
tian symbols, Chinese ideograms, and other figures
from many different lores. Now the thing no longer
looked to me like a porcupine. Now it looked like a
bristling phalanx of mysticism, marching forth to do
battle against common sense. And even though I’m
in the business, it made me shudder.

“He didn’t know it, of course,” Foster said,
“but what Hinton stumbled upon was the mandala
principle. His cubes were the parts; put them all
together in your mind and you create the Eternal,
the Unchanging, the Solid Mandala, or four-dimen-

The thing no longer
looked to me like
a porcupine .

Now it looked like a bristling
phalanx of mysticism,
marching forth
to do battle against
common sense.

sional space, depending upon which terminology
you prefer. Hinton’s cubes were a three-dimensional
exploded view of an aethereal object. This object
refuses to come together in our everyday reality. It
is the unicorn who flees from the view of man—”

“—but lays its head in the lap of a virgin,” I
finished for him.

He shruggec it off. “Never mind the figures
of speech, old boy. Mouse will unscramble my meta-
phors when she types up the manuscript. The point
is, I can use Hinton’s brilliant discovery of the ex-
ploded mandala whose closure produces the inef-
fable object of endless fascination. I can journey
down the endless spiral into the unknown. This is
how the trip begins.”

He pushed a switch on the base of the
coptraption. The sphere began to revolve, the lucite
arms turned, and the cubes on the ends of those
arms turned, too, creating an effect both hypnotic
and disturbing. I was glad when Foster turned it
off.

“My Mandala Machine!” he cried triumphant-
ly. “What do you think?”

“I think you could get your head into a lot of
trouble with that device,” I told him.

“No, no,” he; said irritably. “I mean, what do
you think of it all as the subject for a book?”

No matter what else he was, Foster was a
genuine writer. 'A genuine writer is a person who
will descend voluntarily into the flaming pits of hell
for all eternity, as long as he’s allowed to record his
impressions and send them back to earth for
publication. I thought about the book that would
most likely result from Foster’s project. I estimated
its audience at about one hundred and fifty people
including friends and relatives. Nevertheless, I
heard myself saying, “I’ll buy it.” That’s how I
manage to stay a small and unsuccessful publisher
despite being so smart.

I returned to London shortly after that. Next day
I drove to Glastonbury to spend a few days with
Claude Upshank, owner of the Great White
Brotherhood Press. We have been good friends,
Claude and I, ever since we met ten years ago at a
flying saucer convention in Barcelona.

“I don’t like it,” Claude said, when I told him
about Foster’s project. “The mandala principle is

potentially dangerous. You can really get into trou-
ble when you start setting up autonomous feedback
loops in your brain like that.”

Claude had studied acupuncture and Rolfing
at the Hardrada Institute in Malibu, so I figured he
knew what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I
thought that Charles had a lot of savvy in these
matters and could take care of himself.

When I telephoned Foster two days later, he
told me that the project was going very well. He
had added several refinements to the Mandala Ma-
chine: “Sound effects, for one. I’m using a special
tape of Tibetan horns and gongs-. The overtones,
sufficiently amplified, can send you into instant
trance.” And he had also bought a strobe light to
flash into his eyes at six to ten beats a second:
“The epileptic rate, you know. It’s ideal for loosen-
ing up your head.” He claimed that all of this deep-
ened his state of trance and increased the clarity of
the revolving cubes. “I’m very near to success now,
you know.”

I thought he sounded tired and close to hyste-
ria. I begged him to take a rest.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Show must go on, eh?”

A day later, Foster reported that he was right
on the brink of the final breakthrough. His voice
wavered, and I could hear him panting and wheez-
ing between words. “I’ll admit it’s been more dif-
ficult than I had expected. But now I’m being
assisted by a certain substance which I had the
foresight to bring with me. I am not supposed to
mention it over the telephone in view of the law of
the land and the ever-present possibility of snoops
on the line, so I’ll just remind you of Arthur
Machen’s ‘Novel of the White Powder’ and let you
work out the rest for yourself. Call me tomorrow.
The fourth dimension is finally coming together.”

The next day Mimi answered the telephone
and said that Foster was refusing to take any calls.
She reported him as saying that he was right on the
verge of success and could not be interrupted. He
asked his friends to be patient with him during this
difficult period.

The next day it was the same, Mimi answer-
ing, Foster refusing to speak to us. That night I
conferred with Claude and Pam.

We were in Pam’s smart Chelsea apartment.
We sat together in the bay window drinking tea
and watching the traffic pour down the King’s Road
into Sloane Square. Claude asked, “Does Foster
have any family?”

“None in England,” Pam said. “His mother
and brother are on holiday in Bali.”

“Any close friends?”

“Mouse, of course,” Pam said.

We looked at each other. An odd presenti-
ment had occurred to us simultaneously, a feeling

Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension

that something was going terribly wrong.

“But this is ridiculous,” I said. “Mimi abso-
lutely adores him, and she’s a very competent wom-
an. What could there be to worry about?”

“Let’s call once more,” Claude said.

We tried, and were told that Mimi’s telephone
was out of order. We decided to go to Sepoy Cot-
tage at once.

C laude drove us out in his old Morgan. Mimi
met us at the door. She looked thoroughly
exhausted, yet there was a serenity about
her which I found just a little uncanny.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, leading
us inside. “You have no idea how frightening it’s all
been. Charles came close to losing his mind in these
last days.”

“But why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded.
“Charles implored me not to. He told me—
and I believed him— that he and I had to see this
thing through together. He thought it would be
dangerous to his sanity to bring in anyone else at
this point.”

Claude made a noise that sounded like a
snort. “Well, what happened?”

“It all went very well at first,” Mimi said.
“Charles began to spend increasingly longer periods
in front of the machine, and he came to enjoy the
experience. Soon I could get him away only to eat,
and grudgingly at that. Then he gave up food alto-
gether. After a while he no longer needed the ma-
chine. He could see the cubes and their faces in his
head, could move them around at any -speed he
wanted, bring them together or spread them apart.
The final creation, however, the coming together of
the hypercube, was still eluding him. He went back
to the machine, running it now at its highest
speed.”

Mimi sighed. “Of course, he pushed himself
too hard. This time, when he turned off the ma-
chine, the mandala continued to grow and mutate in
his head. Each cube had taken on hallucinatory sol-
idity. He said the symbols gave off a hellish light
that hurt his eyes. He couldn’t stop those cubes
from thundering through his mind. He felt that he
was being suffocated in a mass of alien signs. He
grew agitated, swinging quickly between elation
and despair. It was during one of his elated swings
that he ripped out the telephone.”

“You should have sent for us!” Claude said.
“There was simply no time. Charles knew
what was happening to him. He said we had to set
up a counter-conditioning program immediately. It
involved changing the symbols on the cube faces.
The idea was to break up the obsessive image-trains
through the altered sequence. I set it up, but it
didn’t seem to work for Charles. He was fading
away before my eyes, occasionally rousing himself

to murmur, ‘The horror, the horror . . .’”

“Bloody hell!” Claude exploded. “And then?”

“I felt that I had to act immediately.
Charles’s system of counter-conditioning had failed.
I decided that he needed a different sort of symbol
to look at— something simple and direct, something
reassuring—”

Just then Charles came slowly down the
stairs. He had lost a lot of weight since I had seen
him last, and his face was haggard. He looked thin,
happy, and not quite sane.

“I was just napping,” he said. “I’ve got
rather a lot of sleep to catch up on. Did Mouse tell
you how she saved what little is left of my sanity?”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “She’s mar-
velous, isn’t she? And to think that I only realized
yesterday that I loved her. We’re getting married
next week, and you’re all invited.”

Mimi said, “I thought we were flying down to
Monte Carlo and getting married in the city hall.”

“Why, so we are.” Charles looked bewildered
for a moment. He touched his head with the uncon-
scious pathos of the wounded soldier in the movie
who hasn’t yet realized that half his head is blown
away. “The old think-piece hasn’t quite recovered
yet from the beating I gave it with those wretched
cubes. If Mimi hadn’t been here, I don’t know what
would have happened to me.”

They beamed at us, the instant happy couple
produced by Hinton’s devilish cubes. The transfor-
mation of Charles’s feelings toward Mimi— from
fond indifference to blind infatuation— struck me as
bizarre and dreamlike. They were Svengali and
Trilby with the sexes reversed, a case of witchcraft
rather than love’s magic.

“It’s going to be all right now, Charles,”
Mimi said.

“Yes, love, I know it is.” Charles smiled, but
the animation had gone out of his face. He lifted his
hand to his head again, and his knees began to sag.
Mimi, her arm around his waist., half supported and
half dragged him to the stairs.

“I’ll just get him up to bed,” she said.

Claude, Pam and I stood in the middle of the
room, looking at each other. Then, with a single ac-
cord, we turned and went into the parlor where the
Mandala Machine was kept.

We approached it with awe, for it was a
modern version of ancient witchcraft. I could im-
agine Charles sitting in front of the thing, its arms
revolving, the cubes turning and flashing, setting
up a single ineradicable image in his mind. The an-
cient Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian letters were
gone. All of the faces of all the cubes now bore a
single symbol— direct and reassuring, just as Mimi
had said, but hardly simple. There were twenty
cubes, with six faces to a cube, and pasted to each
surface was a photograph of M imi Royce. (B

Dream.

by Reginald Brefnor

HER LOVE WAS UNNATURAL AND FORBIDDEN,
THE PENALTY DREADFUL ... and DIVINE.

^om Merton Monahan of the Examiner was
the last man to talk with Emmie Shoolts
before she died, which was not surprising,
since almost no one else on the Hall of Justice night
crews, police or newsmen, ever really spoke to her.
Most of them didn’t even see her. She was as
nonexistent for them as her little cart, her mops
and buckets, her cleaning rags, or the worn gray
stockings collapsed around her swollen ankles; and
those who did notice her either grunted, “Hi, Em-
mie, how’s things?” or, at the best, paused a mo-
ment to kid her, good-naturedly, about her hat.

It was that hat which had first drawn Tom
Monahan’s attention, reminding him at once of hats
worn by ancient Dublin charwomen during his two
years at Trinity College there. It was a dismal ruin
of a hat, the sadly resurrected specter of someone’s
Easter bonnet, its flowers and ribbons surely saved
from abandoned gravestone bouquets. Tom
Monahan had never mentioned it, but he had
spoken to her, his voice and manner half gentle
mockery, half that sincere, unassertive sympathy
one expects (but does not always find) in the confes-
sional, the voice and manner that had helped to
make his reputation as a first-rate police reporter.
Cops and their officers confided in him, to the point
where the Chief himself had intervened more than
once to save him from a well-deserved “Driving
While Under” handed out by some sheriffs deputy
or the state highway patrol, and criminals unloaded
to him more freely than to their lawyers or
psychiatrists.

That first night, he had introduced himself to
her when, as he always did at the first opportunity,
he left the pressroom to go around the corner to
Breedon’s all-night bar, unobtrusively and illegally
kept open as a courtesy to press and police. He
greeted her as formally as he would an opera star,
or the mayor’s wife, or the most successful madame
in a city famous for its great bordellos. He asked
her name, and handed her his card: Thomas Merton
Monahan.

In Dublin, before that at Tulane, and even
earlier, during his unhappy years at the seminary
into which his mother and his Aunt Eileen had
urged him, his full name had always aroused the in-
terest of the literarily inclined, starting many a con-
versation for him, though Merton had been his
mother’s maiden name and she was in no way
related to the poet. Naturally Emmie Shoolts did

not recognize it. Nevertheless she smiled at him and
said, in her rasping, coughing voice, that Merton I
was a real pretty name; she’d always wished she’d j
had a name like that instead of Shoolts, which was j
spelled different back in the old country but which
Shoolts’ s old man had changed because that was |
what they told him to do at Ellis Island, and her
own name had been a pretty one back in New
Jersey, when she’d been a girl. Emma Marie, she’d j
been then, not Emmie. Emma Marie. And— and
when she had her dream— she shuffled on her knees
embarrassedly— then she always heard her ma’s
sweet voice calling after her, “Emma Marie! Emma
Marie!” just like it’d always been.

Tom Monahan had listened to her, looking
down at her featureless, sagging face, smiling at
her along his long, keen Irish nose, and he’d
remarked that surely she must’ve been a lovely girl
herself to go along with such a pretty name; and
then he had gone on to Breedon’s.

After that, whenever his path crossed hers,
they always talked, at least for a few minutes.
Neither of them ever sought the other out, except
that at Easter and before Christmas he always
brought her a rose or two, or a spray of snowdrops.
And neither really confided in the other. She told
him nothing of her life with Shoolts— of the long,
dreadful years of shabby furnished rooms, the
greasy sinks and crusted hot-p.ates, the bathrooms
shared with ten or a dozen others, the time crawl-
ing endlessly against a backdrop of Shoolts hunting
jobs, finding jobs, drinking himself out of jobs. She
told him nothing of the sodden Chicago summer
nights, with Shoolts stinking in the bed beside her,
stinking of beer, of sweat, and of his job swamping
out in the slaughterhouse; of Shoolts and his sudden
strange demands on her, which had so frightened
her at first; of how she had retreated behind an ar-
mor of cheap white port or cheaper muscatel. She
didn’t mention Shoolts’s raving death, or the fact
that every time she cleaned a cuspidor she was
reminded of him. She talked about the weather. She
talked about the tv shows she watched before she
slept. She finally did tell him all about her dream;
and it was because of it that Tom Monahan, in his
half-mocking way, came to cherish her. He found it
rare and beautiful and strangely precious— a small
miracle, if he had still believed in miracles.

She told him how, when she got off work at
midnight, she’d go on home— she only lived a couple

Illustration by William Casey

Dream Along W itli 3Ie

of blocks away— and cook up something so as not to
get started drinking on an empty stomach, and set-
tle down in front of the tv with— she always
winked— a jug, and watch the late, late shows, and
finally doze off.

It was then that the dream would come to
her. In it, all of a sudden, she was young again, and
sort of in the country, like maybe on a farm, with
all around her all this cool green grass and little
flowers, and she was walking through them in her
bare feet, and up ahead of her, beyond the trees,
there was a hill where the sun was rising, all red
and golden, though she couldn’t see it yet,
and— and behind the hill a boy was waiting for her,
somebody real special . . . She knew she loved him
and that he loved her. Then, as she walked toward
him, faster and faster in her eagerness, always
she’d hear her ma’s voice calling in the distance:
“Emma Marie! Emma Marie! You come on back
here, honey! You can’t go walkin’ there in just your
bare feet! Might be there’re snakes.”

And always she turned back, because she
loved her ma. But that was all right, too. The
dream just seemed to last forever, and she knew
whoever was behind the hill would keep on waiting
for her. She never tired of telling Tom Monahan
about it, and the telling varied only in its smallest
details— a meadowlark singing out in the clear
spring air, an emerald lizard skittering from her
path.

Monahan would listen to it all again, realizing
that it was somehow perfect, and always he would
feel a bitter twinge of envy, quelled instantly by
shame, for in his own life there had been much that
was rare and beautiful. He had lived and loved and
argued in the city of Joyce and Synge and Lady
Gregory, walking among the dreams of Ireland’s
poets, and he still had music and the theater, good
food and better liquor, and finely printed books, and
the bright ikon of his own balanced rationalism, and
the sudden excitement that always came to shatter
the tedium of the pressroom and of Breedon’s. He
could feel that her life had been at worst an agony,
at best a desolation; but she had something he did
not have.

For he himself had had no dreams of wonder
or of exaltation. He knew that he did dream, as all
men do, but his dreams vanished at his wakening,
usually leaving only an uncertain aftertaste of ap-
prehension or a vague revulsion, of perils undefined
and narrowly escaped. Years before, during his
adolescence in the ingrown, self-enclosed all-male
world of the seminary, they sometimes had touched
the fringe of nightmare, leaving him in a cold sweat
of uncomprehended terror at their dissolution. But
that had ended when he had escaped, shedding the
Church like a dry, discarded skin, sheathing himself
in a polite, amused intellectual materialism ap-

propriate, perhaps, to an Edwardian drawing
room— an attitude that had actually endeared him
to disputatious Jesuits like his cousin Austin, who
invariably (over a good meal and a glass of wine)
would fence with him about it, oily smiling a little
sadly when, as always, he failed to shake
Monahan’s stand. Only once in their long associa-
tion had Austin let anger flare during their
arguments. Monahan had attacked clerical celibacy,
saying he’d be damned before he’d let anyone
caponize him like that; and Austin, in a voice sud-
denly as hard as Ignatius Loyola’s, had thundered
at him not to be a fool, that you had to be a real
man to be a priest. Monahan, who was very fond of
his cousin, never brought the subject up again.

Even in Ireland, in that isle of dreams, his
mind showed him no splendid visions while he slept;
and during his too brief, too, too unhappy marriage,
the whip of nightmare had occasionally flicked at
him again. Then, of course, there had been affairs,
each seemingly shorter than the last, each less in-
tense, each more distressing to his mother while
she lived, and to his Aunt Eileen. Now, working at
night and always fortifying himself with Breedon’s
aid, he slept untroubled; and when his aunt awaken-
ed him for brunch, as she did every day when she
returned from mass, any dark shadows sleep might
have left to haunt the corners of his huge, book-
lined room were quickly dissipated. Generally
speaking, Tom Monahan was satisfied with life and
with himself; and he always smiled wryly, with that
same gentle mockery he turned against the world,
when he thought that he, with all he was and all he
had, still envied a miserable old woman the one
perfection of her dream.

Almost at the first, she’d said he was the only
person she’d ever told about it, so he told no one
else; one of his professional virtues was that he
could keep a confidence. And in the two and a half
years of their acquaintance, between their first con-
versation and their last, he scarcely mentioned her
to anyone, except perhaps when one of the Hall of
Justice boys kidded him about bringing her a posy.

Indeed, very little had changed between those
two encounters. She was puffier now, her face a
sickly gray, and her hat seemed almost to be woven
into her thin gray hair, like a forgotten bird nest.
Tom Monahan himself had scarcely altered; his
brown, curly hair was not quite as thick, the fine
capillaries along his cheekbones and on his nose a
bit more prominent, and his belt had perhaps been
let out another notch. He stopped beside her in the
hall, they talked about inconsequential things, and
then, with that smile of his, he asked about her
dream; and she beamed up at him, a sudden light
behind her flat, dull eyes, and told him that, Mr.
Monahan, sir, it was, well, getting brighter
somehow, and that she could hardly wait to get

She sciw him suddenly.
Vast and naked,
mightily muscled,
bearded in his manhood,
and tenibly, terribly male,
he towered above her.

__L

home after work. Then he had walked on the
Breedon’s.

E mmie Shoolts, as always, knocked off at
midnight. She stored her cart and cleaning
^things away, washed up, and though she
was bone-weary and her legs ached even more than
they usually did, she put on lipstick and eyebrow
pencil just as if she were going on a date. She got
into her rusty old red coat with the fur collar, pick-
ed up her big net bag, nodded to the three other
women who worked with her, and headed home.

Across from the Hall of Justice, she picked up
a burger and a oag of fries at an all-night hash
joint, cut through a dark alley to save herself a half-
block, turned two corners, and let herself into the
front door of the old hotel she lived in. Once it had
had pretensions, not to luxury but to a superficial
traveling-salesman prosperity; now even that had
worn away. A little imitation marble from what had
been the lobby, long since rented out to a second-
hand store and a launderette, remained in the nar-
row hall by the deserted desk. Its smells were those
of mildew and ur ne and things gone sour and last
year’s cooking.

Emmie took the creaking elevator to - her
third-floor room. The smells lived there too, but to
her they were the smells of home: her bed, pulled
together somehow but never really made, her hot-
plate with most of a can of soup still in a pan next
to it on the sink, her dresser with its small cracked
mirror and photographs— a tinted one of her ma
and pa in a once-gilded metal frame, a couple of her
sister’s kids whom she hadn’t seen for years, and
none of Shoolts. Then there was her tv and her
worn-out easy chair.

She chucked her coat down across the bed,
her bag beside it. She pushed the soup over to a
burner, turned it on. From beneath the sink she
pulled a half-full gallon jug of muscatel. She rinsed
a tumbler out anc filled it. Then she kicked off her
shoes, turned on the tv, and, sighing gratefully, set-
tled herself in front of it with her glass, her ham-
burger, her frencli fries, and her jug next to her.

After a while she rescued what remained of
the soup when it boiled over, and settled back
again, eating it out of the hot pan with a teaspoon.
She refilled the tumbler and sat there sipping. She
watched an inner-city crooked-cop movie for a time,
then a Groucho rerun, then something about
animals in Africa or someplace. Finally an old
feature film got started, all about a real pretty girl
getting hired to take care of a rich man’s kids in a

dark old sort of castle, and at first she found it in-
teresting, but she was getting all loosened up and
comfortable, and her mind began to wander,
sometimes sorrowing momentarily for hopes half-
formed and long since vanished, more often
touching on more pleasant things, like talking to
Mr. Monahan in the corridor or the time, many
years before, when somebody’d tipped her
generously and, without telling Shoolts, she’d got
her wedding ring out of hock.

Gradually she became less and less aware of
the tv’s moving shadows and their voices, more and
more conscious of the waiting in her, of her
eagerness, her hunger, and her fear that, when she
slept, the dream might not come to her. It never
came until the wine had really taken hold, and she
kept topping up her glass. Once she went to the
john, which now she didn’t have to share with
anyone because the room next door was being used
for storage, and sat there with the door open for
ten or fifteen minutes, forcing herself to watch the
screen, fighting off her increasing drowsiness.
When her eyelids started to close in spite of
everything, she shuffled back into her chair, poured
her glass half-full once more, and drank it down.

Instantly the tv was forgotten. She slept. She
dreamed. Abruptly, the dream came. Abruptly, she
came alive within it.

Again the sky yas bright and blue. Again the
sun was just about to rise behind the hill. Again she
felt the cool dew on the long grass that kissed her
ankles, and knew that behind the hill her lover
waited for her. She started forward, listening for
her mother’s voice calling out to her, “Emma
Marie! Emma Marie!”— but there was only silence,
and the soft, ardent sighing of a spring breeze
around her body, and the meadowlark that she had
heard before.

Then she looked down and saw that not only
her feet were bare. She saw the cream-smooth skin
of her breasts and belly, her flushed nipples, the
auburn curls of her young, rounded mound. She
knew exultantly that she was naked and a maid,
and that now, now, now her lover was striding up
the hill to come to her.

Her head thrown back, her long hair stream-
ing, she began to run across the lovely grass and up
the slope as though it wasn’t there.

She saw him suddenly. He had stopped for an
instant at the very crest. But he was not a boy.

Vast and naked, mightily muscled, bearded in
his manhood, and terribly, terribly male, he towered
above her— and at his back the glorious sun washed
him in a red and golden light that seemed, sudden-
ly, to be part of him.

With a wordless cry, she ran to him, and his
great arms opened to her, and there in the soft,
copl grass she opened to him.

Dream Along With JVIe

P"j"^he phone at Breedon’s rang at seven
I minutes before three, and Breedon’s
A nephew, the back-room bartender on the
graveyard shift, put down his poker hand to answer
it.

“It’s Larry on the desk,” he told Tom
Monahan. “Says Doc Gullion just had a man call in
to tell you they’ve got a story for you. Says it’s only
a couple blocks away, at that old hotel, the Simplon,
but you better hurry, and to take Joe over with
you.”

Monahan looked ruefully at his half-empty
glass of Bushmill’s and his three queens. He’d
raised the ante and hadn’t had a chance to draw to
them. “At least let’s finish this one lovely hand,” he
protested.

Joe Carrick, from Homicide, sitting next to
him, folded his own hand. “Lovely, hell!” he said.
“I got nothing, not against three going in.”

The two others at the table, one a long-retired
sergeant who just couldn’t stay away, the other an
overweight ex-cop who worked for Breedon even-
ings, both grunted disgustedly and threw their
hands in.

“Come, come!” pleaded Monahan. “Doc
Gullion never tips me off except when he has
something really gruesome to spoil my night. Won’t
anybody call me just so I can savor these few
moments before going on to his unpleasantness?”

Breedon’s nephew came back carrying the
Bushmill’s bottle. “You touch my heartstrings, Mr.
Monahan,” he said, “but there’s nothing I can do
except show my openers—” He turned over two red
jacks, “—and give you one for the road, on the
house.”

“You’ll need it if this job’s going to be of a
piece with Gullion’s usuals,” Carrick told him,
hoisting himself to his feet, “you being so sensitive
and all.”

“Ah, it’s the Irish in me,” said Tom Monahan,
giving his voice just the right edge of mockery.

Breedon’s nephew laughed. “Yeah, and the
scotch and the bourbon and the rye, and the
Guinesses between.”

“To say nothing of fine wines,” answered
Monahan, downing his drink. “The Simplon, if its
exterior speaks the truth, must be a pretty ratty
sort of fleabag. Well, we can but see what Doctor
Gullion has found us there.”

He and Carrick left, saying they’d be back,
and stepped out into the chill and dirty night, its ci-
ty smells held by the still air.

The Simplon’s sign was out— it looked as
though it had not been lighted for endless
years— and the meat wagon from the morgue was
parked outside the entrance, behind a police car and
a fire department rescue truck. Two or three larger
engines were just revving up to leave.

“Room 317,” the policeman at the door told
them. “Doc Gullion said go right on up.”

“I’ll bet he did!” growled Carrick. “What’s he

got?”

The policeman shrugged. “Some old biddy got
herself burned to death. Can’t see why he’s making
such a deal about it. They get into the booze and
pass out with a cigarette. Crap, it happens all the
time.”

As soon as they stepped out of the elevator,
they smelled the burning, but it was not quite the
stench of burned flesh they had expected; it had
overtones that were vaguely and puzzlingly
aromatic. A few of the hotel’s inhabitants, most of
them elderly and in oddly assorted nightclothes,
some with old overcoats thrown over them as
bathrobes, were clucking in the hallway, another
cop riding herd on them. Tom Monahan and Carrick
shooed their way through to the opened door of
317, and Monahan recognized Emmie Shoolts im-
mediately.

He halted in the doorway, staring at her. She
was dead, there in her easy chair, head thrown
back, body covered by a blanket somebody had
tossed over it. Directly over her, on the cracked
ceiling, there was a still-spreading sooty, smoky
area, with an oily look to it, like those that form
above badly trimmed kerosene heaters. In front of
her the tv was still posturing, though its sound had
been turned off. Her hat had been stepped on and
kicked into a corner; it too was dead.

Tom Monahan stared at her, shocked, abrupt-
ly saddened. It came to him that this, whatever the
specific cause, was how all dreams ended, regard-
less of their beauty or their preciousness. And in-
stantly he was ashamed of the thought that follow-
ed, a small, gloating thought against which even his
cool cynicism was not impervious: that the dream
once cherished In that poor skull was one that he
would never, never, never again need to envy.

Doc Gullion was standing next to her, look-
ing— as he always did to Monahan— like an ar-
tificially fabricated man, all cold and dry and gray,
with colorless thin hair and pinp oint pupils set like
small stones behind his rimless spectacles, a physi-
cian who practiced nothing of the healing art, a doc-
tor to the dead.

“It’s Emmie!” Tom Monahan said softly. “It’s
Emmie Shoolts.”

“Christ!” Carrick exclaimed. “I saw her just
tonight, swabbing down the decks back at the Hall.
What the hell happened to her, Doc?”

“She burned to death.”

“Cigarette?”

Doc Gullion shook his head. “You have con-
firmed our identification very accurately,” he said.
“She was indeed your Emmie Shoolts. But your
idea of the cause is, I regret, in error.” Suddenly he

laughed, a strange metallic sound, a tin horse
neighing. “It was nothing as common as a
cigarette. It was much more rare and interesting
than that.” Delicately he reached for a corner of the
blanket. “That’s why I had them call you, Mr.
Monahan. There are only four or five cases reported
every year, and nobody has any idea of how they
happen, or why. Have you ever heard of the spon-
taneous combustion of human beings, Mr.
Monahan? Nothing burns them. They themselves
burn, from the inside out.”

He pulled the blanket off, revealing the
charred horror under it, charred to the bone, part
of the rib cage, even a section of the spine. He
laughed again. “Our Emmie’s case is typical.
They’re usually old women, and almost always the
victim is a lush.” He gestured at the jug, the empty
tumbler. “And nothing else is burned— see, not
even the cushions of her chair. I’m sure you’ve read
about it. Charles Fort wrote about several of them
in his books.”

Tom Monahan did not move. The blood had
drained abruptly from his face, leaving its capillar-
ies standing out against its pallor. He stared at the
awful thing that had been Emmie Shoolts and
moaned almost imperceptibly.

“Besides,” I)oc Gullion said, “quite typically
there is no evidence of pain. See her face, Mr.
Monahan? Why, she looks happy as a clam!” And
once again he laughed.

Tom Merton Monahan stood there in the sud-
den cold, the sudden silence, utterly isolated in a
new and yet hideously familiar vulnerability. His
world had changed its face completely. Now it was
ancient beyond counting, and dark with mysteries,
and terrible. For now he knew that even though
Emmie Shoolts had perished, her dream had not
mercifully died with her. He knew, incontrovertibly,
beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there in that
mean room, Emma Marie’s long-awaited lover had
t a k en her

“My God!” he whispered. “Oh, my God!
Semele!”

“How’s that?” Carrick looked at him
anxiously.

Doc Gullion answered him. “It’s an old

legend. Greek. Zeus came down off his Olympus,
and screwed this Greek girl named Semele, and
burned her up. Hot stuff, those gods. Handel made
an opera out of it.” He gestured to two morgue
attendants who had brought up a stretcher and a
body bag. “Somehow I can’t see a god coming
down here and picking on old Emmie, but who
knows? It could be as good an explanation as any,
Mr. Monahan— except that once in a while it hap-
pens to men too.”

“It what?” Tom Monahan spoke through the
terror rising in his throat.

For a moment, Doc Gullion. eyed him coldly,
calculatingly. “It happens to some men,” he said.
“Much more rarely than to women, but still it does.
Maybe the Greeks can tell you why.”

Then he went about winding up his business
with the morgue attendants.

^'f'Som Monahan followed Carrick silently down
the hallway. Saying not a word, he stood
beside him in the elevator. He went with
him out into the street, the night. He started sud-
denly, uncontrollably, when Carrick touched his
shoulder with a friendly hand.

“Tom, Tom,” Carrick said, full of concern.
“Boy, you’re all shook up. It’s always tough, but
hell! In this business you just got to get used to it.
Come on back to Brqpdon’s. A couple more shots
and a few winners and you’ll be as good as new.”

Monahan shook his head. Above him in the
night, around him, subtly behind his back, night-
mares mewled and screamed, the dreams that lived
in darkness, that haunted sleep.

“I— I need a walk!” he stammered, and Car-
rick heard the edge of hysteria in his voice.

“Okay, chum,” he said unhappily. “Maybe you
know best.” He turned away.

Tom Monahan waited for a minute while the
nightmares surged around him, lapping at his feet.
Then, as Orestes fled the Furies, he fled through
the city’s streets, never quite running, always curb-
ing the impulse at the final moment. He fled from
that night-world newly seen, and from himself. Min-
utes went by, and blocks of buildings, and street-
lights. He climbed steep sidewalks. He panted, un-
conscious of his panting.

Finally he recognized the building. It was on
his right, the small old church of Notre Dame des
Victoires, built years ago by and for the Frenchmen
of the city. He ran up its steps, and at the door he
paused, certain that the handle would never, at that
hour, open for him, not daring yet to try. He fell to
his knees in front of it and, rocking back and forth,
he crossed himself, conscious only of his mind cry-
ing out its desperate, despairing plea for rescue
from the unknown and the unknowable, its plea for
refuge: Hail Mary, full of grace ... ©

MOST
CHRISTMAS

BY ROD SEEDING

We lay there with a resignation to the wet,
to fatigue, and to a neutral awareness
that we breathed and could walk and
that ten miles down the mountain
f there would be sleep and food. A nineteen-
year-old Second Looie got up to his feet
and spoke through the first beard he’d ever worn.

“All right-on your feet. Let’s move out.”

We rose— the packs, the ammo belts, the
weaponry, all fused to us like extensions of our
bodies, the weight so constant that it was all part
of us— and we started to plod slowly through the
ankle-deep mud ... a long line of dirty, bearded
samenesses.

And then somebody far up the line stopped
• dead, and there was a whispered

message that went down past the
ranks. Each man froze and held his
breath because any whisper passed
down from up front meant a
machine gun or a pocket of
Japanese

or a mined trail or any one of a dozen other
reminders that there was a war here and we were a
part of it. But this particular message was nothing
less than an incredible jar to memory— a reminder
of a different sort. The whispered voice of the man
in front of me said, “It’s Christmas.”

I continued to lift my feet up, one after the
other, weighed down by the fifty pounds of equip-
ment attached to a sparse one-hundred-pound
frame, and suddenly I wasn’t aware of the cold
rain. I wasn’t conscious of the mud that clung. I
gave no thought to the sick little ache, deep inside
the gut, that had been with us for so many days.
Someone had just transformed the world. Two
words had just reminded us that this was the Earth
and this was mankind and that people still lived and
that we did, also. “It’s Christmas.”

And then a scratchy, discordant, monotone
voice way up front started to sing, “Oh Come All
Ye Faithful.” Somebody else picked it up and then
we all sang. We sang as we walked through the

* the wounded by the hand
looked back on the row

JMP IS day of all

Lost and Found

* Connie Willis

YOU'LL KNOW THE FUTURE'S DRAWING TO AN END
WHEN THE PAST BEGINS TURNING UP.

I s it the end of the world?” Megan asked.
“Losing your cup, I mean?” Finney had come
up to the Reverend Mr. Davidson’s study to
see if he might have left it there, and had found
Megan at her father’s desk, pasting bits of cotton
wool to a sheet of blue paper.

“No, of course not,” Finney said. “It’s only
annoying. It’s the third time this week I’ve lost it.”
He pulled the desk drawers open one by one. The
top two were empty. The bottom was full of con-
struction paper. He limped around the desk to a
chair and dropped down onto it.

He watched Megan. The top two buttons of
her blouse were unbuttoned, and she was leaning
forward over the paper, so Finney had a nice view
of her bosom, though she was unaware of it. She
was making a botch of the pasting, daubing the
brown glue onto the cotton instead of the paper.
The glue leaked through the cotton wool when she
pounded it down with the flat of her hand, and
sticky bits of it clung to her palm. The face of an
angel and the body of a woman, and she could not
paste as well as her church school class. It was her
father the Reverend Mr. Davidson’s voice one heard
when she spoke, his learned speech patterns and
quotations of scripture, but the effect was strong
enough that one forgot she recited them without
understanding. Finney constantly had to remind
himself that she was only a child, even if she was
eighteen, that her words were children’s words with
children’s meanings, inspired though they might
sound.

“Why did you ask if it were the end of the
world?” Finney. said.

“Because then you might find your cup. ‘Of
all which he hath given me I should lose nothing,
but should raise it up again at the last day.’ When is
Daddy coming home?”

Finney’s foot began to throb. “When he’s fin-
ished with his business.”

“I hope he comes soon,” Megan said. “There
are only the three of us till he comes.”

“Yes,” Finney said, thinking of the other
teacher, Mrs. Andover. A fine threesome to hold
down the fort: a middle-aged spinster, an eighteen-
year-old child, and a thirty-year-old . . . what?
Church school teacher, he told himself grimly. His
foot began to ache, worse than ever. Lame church
school teacher.

“I hope he comes soon,” Megan said again.
“So do I. What are you making?”

“Sheep,” Megan said. She held up the paper.
White bits of the cotton wool were stuck randomly
to the blue paper. They looked like clouds in a blue
sky. “My class is going to make them after tea.”

“Where are your children then?” Finney said,
trying to keep his voice casual.

She looked at him with round blue eyes. “We
were playing a game outside before. About sheep.
So I came in to make some.”

St. John’s at End sat on a round island in the
middle of the River End. The river on both sides
was so shallow one could walk across it, but it was
possible to drown in only a foot of water, wasn’t it?
Finney nearly had.

“I’ll find them,” he said.

“ ‘The lost shall be found,’ ” Megan said, and
patted a bit of wool with her hand.

H e collided with Mrs. Andover on the stairs.
“Megan’s let her class out with no one to
watch them,” he said rapidly. “She’s in
there pasting and the children are God knows
where. My boys are out, but they won’t think to
watch for them.”

Mrs. Andover turned and walked slowly down
the stairs ahead of him, as if she were purposely im-
peding his progress. “The children are perfectly all
right,” she said calmly. She stopped at the foot of
the stairs and faced Finney, her arms folded across
her matronly bosom. “I set one of the older girls to
watch them,” she said. “She has been spying for
me all week, seeing that nothing- happens to them.”

Finney was a little taken aback. Mrs. Andover
was so much the Oxford tour guide, prim blue skirt
and sturdy walking shoes. He would have thought a
word like “spying” beneath her.

“You needn’t worry,” she said, mistaking Fin-
ney’s surprise for concern. “I’m paying her. Two
pounds the week. Money’s the root of all loyalty,
isn’t it then?”

“Sometimes,” Finney said, even more sur-
prised. “At any rate, I think I’ll go make sure of
them.”

Mrs. Andover lifted an eyebrow and said,
“Whatever you think best.” She turned at the land-
ing and went into the sanctuary. Finney started out
the side door and then stopped, wondering what
Mrs. Andover could possibly be doing in there. She
had not had a pocket torch with her, and the sanc-
tuary was nearly pitch black. He hesitated, then
turned painfully around, using the stone lintel for
support, and followed her inside.

At first he could not see her. The spaces
where the stained glass windows had been were
boarded up with sheets of plywood. Only the little
arch at the top was left open to let in light. The
windows had been the first to g o, of course, even
before the government had decided that a state
church should by definition help' support the state.

Illustration by Brad Hamann

Lost and Found

The windows had been sold because the cults could
afford to buy them, and the churches needed the
money. The government had seen at once that the
churches should be a source of income as well as
grace, and the systematic sacking had begun. The
great cathedrals like York and Salisbury were long
since stripped bare, and it would not be long before
it reached St. John’s.

St. John’s will be crammed with spies, Finney
thought. The Reverend Mr. Davidson, Mrs. Ando-
ver’s girl, the government spies, and myself, all
working undercover in one way or another. We
shall have to sell the pews to make room for every-
one. He stood perfectly still, balancing on his good
foot. He let his eyes adjust, waiting to get his bear-
ings from the marble angel that always shone dimly
near the doors. The little curved triangles of sky
were thick with gray clouds that absorbed the light
like Megan’s cotton wool absorbed the brown glue.

He caught a glimpse of white to the left, but
it was not the angel. It was Mrs. Andover’s white
blouse. She was bending Over one of the pews. “I
say,” he called out cheerfully, “this would make a
good hiding place, wouldn’t it?”

She straightened abruptly.

“What are you looking for?” Finney said,
making his way toward her with the pew backs for
awkward crutches.

“Your cup,” Mrs. Andover said nervously. “I
heard you tell Megan you’d lost it again. I thought
one of the children might have hidden it.”

Mrs. Andover was full of surprises today. Fin-
ney did not really know her at all, had not really
thought about her presence though she had come
after he did. Finney had ticketed her from the start
as a schoolmistress spinster and not thought any
more about her. Now he was not certain he should
have dismissed her so easily. “What are you doing
here?” he said aloud.

“I was not aware the sanctuary was off lim-
its,” she snapped. Finney was amazed. She looked
as properly guilty as any of his upper form boys.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “I was
only wondering how you came to be here at St.
John’s.”

She looked even guiltier, which was ridicu-
lous. What had she been doing in here?

“One might wonder the same thing about
you, Mr. Finney.” She looked coldly at his stub of a
foot. “You apparently came here through violent
means.”

Very good, thought Finney. “A shark bit it
off,” he said. “In the River End. I was wading.”

“It is no wonder you are so concerned about
the children then. Perhaps you’d better go see to
them.” She started past him. He put out his hand to
stop her, not even sure of what he wanted to say.

She stopped stock still. “I shouldn’t question other
people’s fitness to teach, Mr. Finney,” she said. “A
lame man and a half-witted girl. The Reverend Mr.
Davidson is apparently not in a position to pick and

choose who represents his church.”

Finney thought of Reverend Davidson bend-
ing over him, his shoes wet and his trousers splat-
tered with water and Finney’s blood. He had
propped Finney’s arm around his neck and then,
as if Finney were one of his children, picked him up
and carried him out of the water. “Either that,”
Finney said, “or he has Jesus’s unfortunate affinity
for idiots and cripples. Which are you, Mrs.
Andover?”

She shook off his hand and brushed angrily
past him.

“What were you looking for, Mrs. Andover?”
Finney said. “What exactly did you expect to find?”

“Hullo,” Megan said as if or cue. “Look what
I’ve just found.”

She was holding a heavy leather notebook,
full of yellowing pages. “I was looking for some
nice black construction paper to make shadows
with,” she said. “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death.’ I thought how nice it
would be if each of the sheep had a nice black sha-
dow and I looked in the bottom drawer of Daddy’s
desk, where he always keeps the paper, and this is
all that was in there. Not any green at all.” She
handed the notebook to Finney.

“Green shadows?” he said absently, thinking
of the drawer he had pulled out, full of colored
paper.

“Of course not,” Megan said. “Green
pastures. ‘He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures.’ ”

He wasn’t really listening to her. He was
looking at the notebook. It was made of a soft, dark
brown leather, now stiffening at the edges and even
peeling off in curling layers at one corner. He
started to open the cover. Mrs. Andover made a
sound. Finney looked over Megan’s bright blond
head at her. Her face was lined with triumph.

“Is it Daddy’s?” Megan said.

“I don’t know,” Finney said. Megan’s sticky
fingers had marked the cover with bits of cotton
and stuck the first two pages to the cover. Finney
looked at the close handwriting on the pages, writ-
ten in faded blue ink. He gently pried the glued
pages from the cover.

“Is it?” Megan said insistently.

“No,” Finney said finally. “It appears to
belong to T. E. Lawrence. How did it get in your
father’s desk?”

“Megan,” Mrs. Andover said, “it’s time for
the children to come in. Go and fetch them.”

“Is it time for tea then?” Megan said.

There would be no
question of cutting off
a foot this time. They
would murder him,
and they would find a
scripture to say over
him as they did it.

Finney looked at his watch. “Not yet,” he
said. “It’s only three.”

“We’ll have it early today,” Mrs. Andover
said. “Tell them to come in for their tea.”

Megan ran out. Mrs. Andover came over to
stand beside Finney. He said, “It looks like a rough
draft of a book or something. Like a manuscript.
What do you think?”

“I don’t need to think,” Mrs. Andover said.
“I know what it is. It’s the manuscript copy of
Lawrence’s book his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He
wrote it after he became famous as Lawrence of
Arabia, before he ... succumbed to his unhappi-
ness. It was lost in Reading Railway Station in
1919.”

“How did it get here?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Mrs. Andover said.

Finney looked at her, amazed. She was star-
ing at him as if he might actually know something
about it. “I wasn’t even born in 1919. live never
even been in Reading Station.”

“It wasn’t in the desk this morning when I
searched it.”

“Oh, really,” Finney said, “and what were
you looking for in Reverend Davidson’s desk? Green
construction paper?”

“I’ve set the tea out,” Megan said from the
doorway, “only I can’t find any cups.”

“I forgot,” Finney said. “Jesus was fond of
tax collectors, too, wasn’t he?”

F inney went into the kitchen on the excuse of
looking for something better than a paper
cup for h:s tea. Instead he stood at the sink
and stared at the wall. If the brown leather note-
book were truly a lost manuscript of Lawrence’s
book, and if Mrs. Andover was one of the state’s
spies, as he was almost certain she was, Reverend
Davidson would lose his church for withholding
treasures from the state. That was not the worst of
it. His name and picture would be in all the papers,
and that would mean an end to the undercover
rescue work getting the children out of the cults—
and an end to the children.

“Take care of her, Finney,” he had said
before he left. “ ‘Into thy hands I commend my
spirit.’ ” And he had let a government spy loose in
the church, had let her roam about taking inven-
tory. Finney gripped the linoleum drainboard.

Perhaps she was not from the government.

Even if she was, she might be here for a totally dif-
ferent reason. Finney was a reporter, but he was
hardly here for a good story. He was here because
he had nearly bled to death in the End, and David-
son had pulled him out. Perhaps he had rescued
Mrs. Andover, too, had brought her into the fold
like all the rest of his lost lambs.

Finney was not even sure why he was here.
He told himself he was staying until his foot healed,
until Davidson found another teacher for the upper
form boys, until Davidson got safely back from the
north. He did not think it was because he was
afraid, although of course he was afraid. They
would know he was a reporter by now, they would
know he had been working undercover, investiga-
ting the cults. There would be no question of cut-
ting off a foot for attempting to escape this time.
They would murder him, and they would find a
scripture to say over him as they did it. “If thy
right hand offend, cut it off.” He had thought he
never wanted to hear scripture again. Perhaps that
was why he stayed. To hear Megan prattling her
sweet and senseless scripture was like a balm. And
what was St. John’s to Mrs. Andover? A balm? A
refuge? Or an enemy to be conquered and then
sacked?

Megan came in, knelt down beside the cup-
board below the sink, and began banging about.

“What are you* looking for?” Finney said.

“Your cup, of course. Mrs. Andover found
some others, but not yours.”

“Megan,” he said seriously, kneeling beside
her, “what do you know about Mrs. Andover?”

“She’s a spy,” Megan said from inside the
cupboard.

“Why do you think that?”

“Daddy said so. He gave her all the treasures.
The marble angel and the choir screen and all the
candlesticks. ‘Render unto Caesar that which is
Caesar’s.’ It isn’t there,” she said, pulling her head
out of the cupboard. “Only pots.” She handed
Finney a rusted iron skillet and two banged-about
aluminum pots. Finney put them carefully back into
the empty cupboard, trying to think how best to ask
Megan why she thought Mrs. Andover had stayed
on. Her answer might be nonsense, of course, or it
might be inspired. It might be scripture.

“She thinks we didn’t give her all the treas-
ures,” Megan volunteered suddenly, on her knees
beside him. “She asks me all the time where Daddy
hid them.”

“And wlTat do you tell her?”

“ ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth, where moths corrupt and thieves break in
and steal.’ ”

“Good girl,” Finney said, and lifted her up.
“What’s an old cup? We’ll find it later.” He took

Lost and Found

her hand and led her into tea.

M rs. Andover was already being mother,
pouring hot milk and tea into a Styrofoam
cup with a half-circle bitten out of it. She
handed it to Finney. “Did you and Megan find your
cup?” she asked.

“No,” Finney said. “But then we aren’t ex-
perts like you, are we?”

Mrs. Andover did not answer him. She poured
out Megan’s tea. “When is your father coming
back, Megan?” she said.

“Not soon enough,” Finney snapped. “Are
you that eager to arrest him? Or is it hanging
you’re after, for treasonable offenses?” He thought
of Davidson, crouched by a gate somewhere, wait-
ing for the child to be bundled out to him. “If the
cults don’t murder him, the government will; is that
the game then? How can he possibly win a game
like that?”

“The game’s not finished yet,” Megan said.
“What?” Finney slopped tea all over his
trousers.

“Go and finish your game,” Mrs. Andover
said. “Take the children with you. You needn’t
come in till it’s ended.” Now that Finney was look-
ing for it, he saw her nod to a tall girl with a large
bosom. The girl nodded back and went out after the
children. What else had he missed because he
wasn’t looking for it?

“It’s a game of Megan’s,” Mrs. Andover said
to Finney. “One child’s the shepherd, and he must
get all the sheep into the fold by putting them in-
side a ring drawn on the ground. When he’s got
them all inside the ring, then it’s bang!— the end—
and all adjourn for tea and cake.”

“Bang! The end,” said Finney. “Tea and
cakes for everyone. I wish it were as simple as
that.”

“Perhaps you should join one of the cults,”
Mrs. Andover said.

Finney looked up sharply from his tea.

“They are always preaching the end, aren’t
they? When it’s coming and to whom. Lists of
who’s to be saved and who’s to be left to his own
devices. Dates and places and timetables.”

“They’re wrong,” Finney said. “It’s supposed
to come like a thief in the night, so no one will see
it coming.”

“I doubt there’s a thief could get past me
without my knowing it.”

“Yes, I forgot,” said Finney. “‘It takes a
thief to catch a thief.’ Isn’t that one of Megan’s
scriptures?”

She looked thoughtful. “Aren’t the lost sup-
posed to be safely gathered into the fold before the
end can come?”

“Ah, yes,” said Finney, “but the good
shepherd never does specify just who those lost
ones are he’s so bent on finding. Perhaps he has
a list of his own, and when all the people on it
are safely inside some circle he’s drawn on the
ground ...”

“Or perhaps we don’t understand at all,” Mrs.
Andover said dreamily. “Perhaps the lost are not
people at all, but things. Perhaps it’s they that are
being gathered in before the end. T. E. Lawrence
was a lost soul, wasn’t he?”

“I’d hardly call Lawrence of Arabia lost,”
Finney said. “He seemed to know his way round
the Middle East rather well.”

“He hired a man to flog him, did you know
that? He would have had to be well and truly lost to
have done that.” She looked up suddenly at Finney.
“If something else turned up, something valuable,
that would prove the end was coming, wouldn’t it?”

“It would prove something,” Finney said.
“I’m not certain what.”

“Where exactly is your Reverend Mr. David-
son?” she asked, almost offhand, as if she could
catch him by changing the subject.

He is out rescuing the lost, dear lady, while
you sit here seducing admissions out of me. A thief
can’t sne.ak past me either. “In London, of course,”
Finney said. “Pawning the crown jewels and hiding
the money in Swiss bank accounts.”

“Quite possibly,” Mrs. Andover said.
“Perhaps he should think about returning to St.
John’s. He is in a good deal of trouble.”

F inney pulled his class in and sat them down
in the crypt. “‘Tisn’t fair,” one of the taller
boys said. “The game was still going. It
wasn’t very nice of you to pull us in like that.” He
kicked at the gilded toe of a fifteenth-century wool
merchant.

“I quite agree,” Finney said, which remark
caused all of them to sit up and look at him, even
the kicker. “It was not fair. Neither was it fair for
me to have had to drink my tea from a paper cup.”

“It isn’t our bloody fault you lost the cup,”
the boy said sulkily.

“That would be quite true, if indeed the cup
were lost. The Holy Grail has been lost for cen-
turies and never found, and that is certainly no
one’s bloody fault. But my cup is not lost forever,
and you are going to find it.” He tried to sound
angry, so they would look and not play. “I want
you to search every nook and cranny of this church,
and if you find the cup—” Here was the tricky bit,
just the right casual tone, “—or anything else in-
teresting, bring it straightaway to me.” He paused
and then said, as if he had just thought of it, “I’ll
give fifty pence for every treasure.”

The children scattered like players in a game.
Finney hobbled up the stairs after them and stood
in the side door. The younger children were down
by the water, and Mrs. Andover was standing near
them.

Two of the boys plummeted past Finney and
up the stairs to the study. “Don’t—” Finney said,
but they were already past him. By the time he had
managed the stair s, the boys had strewn open every
drawer of the desk. They were tumbling colored
paper out of the bottom drawer, trying to see what
was under it.

“It isn’t there,” one of the boys said, and Fin-
ney’s heart caught.

“What isn’t?”

“Your cup. This is where we hid it. This
morning.”

“You must be mistaken,” he said, and led
them firmly down the stairs. Halfway down, Mrs.
Andover’s girl buret in at them. “She says you are
to come at once,” she said breathlessly.

Finney released the boys. “You two can
redeem yourselves by finding my cup.” And then,
as they escaped down the stairs to the crypt, he
shouted, “And stay out of the study.”

Mrs. Andover was standing by the End,
watching the children and Megan wade knee-deep
in the clear water. The sun had come out. Finney
could see the flash of sunlight off Megan’s hair.

“They’re playing a game,” Mrs. Andover said
without looking at him. “It’s an old nursery rhyme
about how bad Kang John lost his clothes in the
Wash. The children stand in a circle, and when the
rhyme’s done, they fall down in the water. Megan
stepped on something when she went down. She cut
her foot.”

Water and blood and Davidson reaching out
for Finney’s hand. “No!” Finney had cried, “not
my hand, too!” Davidson had started to say
something and Finney had flailed away from him
like a landed fish, afraid it would be holy scripture.
But he had said, ‘The cults did this to you, didn’t

they?” in a voice that had no holiness in it at all,
and Finney had collapsed gratefully into his arms.

“Is she hurt?” he said, blinded by the sun and
the memory.

“It was just a scratch,” Mrs. Andover said.
“King John did lose his clothes. In a battle in 1215.
His army was fighting in a muddy estuary of the
Wash when a tide came in and knocked everyone
under. He lost his crown, too.”

“And it was never found,” Finney said, know-
ing what was coming.

“Not until now.”

“Megan!” Finney shouted. “Come here right

now!”

She ran up out of the water, her bare legs
dripping wet. In her hand was a rusty circle that
looked more like a tin lid than a crown. He did not
have the slightest doubt that it was what Mrs.
Andover said, the crown of a king dead eight hun-
dred years.

“Give me the crown, Megan,” Finney said.

“‘Behold I come quickly. Hold fast that which
thou hast, that no man take thy crown,”’ she said,
handing it to Finney.

Finney scratched through the encrusted
minerals to the definite scrape of metal. It was
thinner in several spots. Finney poked his little
finger into one of the indentations and through it,
making a round hole.#

“Those are for the jewels,” Megan said.

“What makes you think that?” Mrs. Andover
said. “Have you seen any jewels?”

“All crowns have jewels,” Megan said. Finney
handed the crown back to her, and she put it on.
Finney looked at the sky behind Megan’s head. The
clouds had pulled back from a little circlet of blue
over the church. “Can I go back now?” Megan said.
“The game’s almost done.”

“This is the End,” Finney said, watching her
walk fearlessly into the water. “Not the Wash.”

“Nor is it the Reading Railway Station,” Mrs.
Andover said. “Nevertheless.”

“The water’s perfectly clear. I would have
seen it. Someone would have seen it. It can’t have
lain there since 1215.”

“It could have been put there,” Mrs. Andover
said. “After the jewels had been removed.”

“So could the colored paper,” he said without
thinking, “after the book was taken out.”

“What about the paper?” Mrs. Andover said.

“It’s back in the drawer where Megan found
the book. I saW it.”

“You might have put it back.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, “the pious
Reverend Davidson has come back without telling
us.”

Lost and Found

“For what purpose?” Finney said, losing his
temper altogether. “To play some incredible game
of hide and seek? To race about his church scatter-
ing priceless manuscripts and ancient crowns like
prizes for us to find? What would we have to find to
convince you he’s innocent. The Holy Grail?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Andover said coldly, and started
back toward the church.

“Where are you going?” Finney shouted.

“To see for myself this miracle of the colored
paper.”

“King John was a pretty lost soul, too,” he
shouted at her back. “Perhaps he’s the last on the
list. Perhaps it’ll all go bang before you even get to
the church.”

But she safely made it to the vestry door and
inside, and Finney hobbled after her, suddenly
afraid of what his boys might have found now.

Mrs. Andover was staring bleakly into the
open drawer as Finney had done, as if it held some
answer. Finney felt a pang of pity for her, standing
there in her sturdy shoes, believing in no one, alone
in the enemy camp. He put his hand out to her
shoulder, but she flinched away from his touch.
There was a sudden clatter on the stairs, and the
two boys exploded into the room with Finney’s cup.

“Look what we found!” one of them said.

“And you’ll never guess what else,” the other
said, tumbling his words out. “After you said we
shouldn’t look in here, we went down to the sanc-
tuary, only it was too dark to see properly. So then
we went into where we all have tea, and there were
no good hiding places at all, so we said to ourselves,
Where would a cup logically be? And the answer, of
course, was in the kitchen.” He stopped to take a
breath. “We pulled everything out of the cupboard,
but it was just pots.”

“And an iron skillet,” Finney said.

“So we were putting them all back when we
saw something else, a big old metal sort of thing
rather like a cup, and your cup was inside it!” He
handed the china cup triumphantly to Finney.

“Where is it?” Mrs. Andover said, as if it
were an effort to speak. “This big old metal cup?”

“In the kitchen. We’ll fetch it if you like.”

“Please do.”

The boys dashed out. Finney turned to look at
her. “It wasn’t there. Megan and I looked. You
know what it is, don’t you?” Finney said, his heart
beating sickeningly fast. It was the way he had felt
before he lost his foot, when he saw the ax coming
down.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he said
accusingly. “It’s the proof you said you wanted.”

“Yes,” she said, her lip trembling. “Only I
didn’t know what it would mean.”

The boys were already racketing up the
stairs. They burst in the door with it. For one awful
endless moment, the steel blade falling against the
sound of his own heart, louder than the drone of
scripture, Finney prayed that it was an old metal
cup.

The boys set it on the desk. It was badly
dented from endless hidings and secretings and
journeys, tarnished like an old spoon. It shone like
the cup of the sky.

“Is it a treasure?” asked the boy who had
stolen Finney’s cup, looking at their faces. “Do we
get the fifty pence?”

“It is the Holy Grail,” Mrs. Andover said,
putting her hands on it like a benediction.

“I thought it was lost forever.”

“It was,” she said. ‘“I should lose nothing,
but should raise it up again at the last day.’”

Finney rubbed the back of his hand across his
dry mouth. “I think we’d better get the children in-
side,” he said.

He sent the boys downstairs to put the kettle
on for tea. Mrs. Andover stood by the desk, holding
onto the Grail as if she were afraid of what would
happen if she let go.

“It isn’t so bad once it’s ever,” Finney said.
“What you think is the end isn’t always, and it
turns out better than you dreamed.”

She set the Grail down gently and turned to

him.

“It is only the last moment before the blade
falls that is hard to bear,” he said.

“I have never told you,” Mrs. Andover said,
her eyes filling with tears, “how sorry I am about
your foot.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.

“It doesn’t matter,” Finney said. “At any
rate, the way things seem to be going, it might just
turn up.”

She smiled at that, dabbing her eyes with the
handkerchief, but when they went down the stairs,
she clung to Finney’s arm as if she were the one
who was lame. Finney sent her nto the kitchen to
set out the tea things and then went down to the
edge of the End to bring the children in.

“Is Daddy here?” Megan said, dancing along
beside him with one hand on her crown to keep it
from falling off. “Is that why we’re having tea
again?”

“No,” Finney said. “But he’s coming. He’ll be
here soon.”

‘“Surely I come quickly,’’ Megan said, and
ran inside.

Finney looked at the sky. Above the church
the clouds peeled back from the blue like the edges
of a scroll. Finney shut and barred the double doors
to the sanctuary. He bolted the side door on the
stairs and wedged a folding chsir under the lock.
Then he went in to tea. tB

T Z • SCREEN PREVIEW

Ghost Stor

PETER STRAUB'S NOVEL ABOUT A SHAPE-CHANGING DEMONESS
HAS UNDERGONE SOME SHAPE-CHANGES OF ITS OWN ON THE WAY
TO THE SCREEN. TZ'S ROBERT MARTIN COVERS THE TRANSFORMATION.

N othing strikes literate moviegoers with such

profound trepidation as the film adaptation of a
novel that they look upon with great affection.
This is particularly so among lovers of macabre
literature— not because they’re so sensitive, but because
they’ve been sinned against so very often. Poe and
Lovecraft would undoubtedly weep if they saw the films
attributed to them; unfortunately, they aren’t around to
defend themselves, or even to collect option money. But
an author need not be dead to fall victim to infidels
from Los Angeles. The two contemporary writers of
macabre fiction whose work most frequently reaches the
big screen, Richard Matheson and Stephen King, have
found that the best defense is to write their own
screenplays.

The Novelist

Even without decades of ill precedent, the task of
adapting Peter Straub’s Ghost Story would seem a
formidable one, due to the sheer size and intricate
structure of the novel. Though Straub began writing
Ghost Story shortly after his third novel, Julia, was
bought for filming (to become the lackluster Haunting
of Julia), he acknowledges that he had little thought of
possible film sales in writing the book— a fact that’s
certainly obvious in the reading of it.

Straub’s Ghost Story, though replete with flashbacks,
flashforwards, and interludes of story-within-story,
nevertheless tells a simple tale of revenge from a dark
beyond. Central to the story are five elderly gentlemen,
Sears James, Ricky Hawthorne, John Jeffrey, Ed
Wanderley, and Lewis Benedikt, all of whom are
haunted by memories of a tragic night a half-century
before in their native town of Milburn, a quiet
community in upstate New York. When Wanderley dies
under strange circumstances, the Society members come
to suspect that the evil of that night still lives, and the
remaining members institute the practice of telling
weekly horror tales, each in their turn. The one story
that no member dares to recite is the story of that
night, the story of the death of Eva Galli. After a year
has passed, the haunted men decide to send for
Wanderley’s nephew, Don Wanderley, a writer of
supernatural fiction, in the hope that he might be able
to help them lay the ghost of Galli to rest.

That is merely the starting point for a story of
tremendous scope which encompasses vengeful spirits,
geometries of love well beyond the simple triangles,
cattle mutilations, meditations upon aging and the
fragility of life, and a shape-shifting were-creature who
serves as the archetypal Beast from the Id. Certainly
the most remarkable attribute of the novel is that all of

Ghost Story

these elements are elegantly supported by the narrative
and lead to a conclusion of truly operatic proportions.

The diversity of the book is explained by its origins;
as Straub explains it, the novel started as a kind of
literary experiment. “I wanted the novel to simply grow
out of stories that several people would tell each
other,” he says. “My thoughts took a number of
misdirections, but at the start I knew that I wanted to
adapt stories from several great writers of the past:
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’
Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ and Poe’s
‘House of Usher.’ The first thing I did was derive the
names of the Chowder Society members, and as soon as
I thought of their names, I immediately had an idea of
their characters. I subsequently wrote the Hawthorne
story, which was told by Ricky Hawthorne, and the
James story, told by Sears James, but I found that the
stories, meant simply to introduce the book, were likely
to take up half of a very long book, and I was straining
to make the connections between them. So I removed
the Hawthorne story and never did write my version of
the Poe. From then on, I had virtually the entire plot
set up for me, though I didn’t tfnow it at the time.

Only gradually did I come to see how Gregory and
Fenny Bate, the two James-inspired characters, would
come back into the story.”

Straub acknowledges a major debt for the book’s
final shape to his friend Stephen King. “I met him for
the first time while I was in the middle of Ghost
Story, ” says Straub. “We spent a lot of time together,
and certain aspects of his character certainly influenced
me. But I was also influenced by ‘Salem’s Lot. That
book helped me see how I could organize a lot of
characters; it was like a map of how to do that, and
I quickly appropriated the map.”

When Straub was advised of Universal Pictures’
purchase of the book immediately after its pre-
publication paperback auction, he greeted the news with
surprised pleasure and a certain amount of concern.
Straub is a great movie fan— our chat was frequently
punctuated by tangential discussions of films— and he
was well aware that Ghost Story could either be

In the tiny upstate New York town of Milburn, the elderly
members of the Chowder Society gather with young Don
Wanderley (Craig Wasson) and Stella Hawthorne (Patricia

Neal) after the mysterious death of Wanderley’s twin brother.

The Chowder Society members share a secret: their
complicity in the accidental death fifty years before of
beautiful Eva Galli (also played by Alice Krige), drowned
in the back seat of a submerged car.

stripped down to a jack-in-the-box spook story or,
without careful pruning, become a sprawling hodgepodge.

The Director

When we talked with Ghost Story’s director,

John Irvin, it was against a background of music-
multilayered, percussive, frantic but elegant, the sound
of an ethereal party. “Yes, it’s a good rich sound, isn’t
it?” Irvin said in accepting our compliments on the
score. “It was composed by Phillipe Sarde for an
eighty-five-piece orchestra. The particular section you’re
hearing now is from a scene where a couple is running
back to their apartment to make love.”

The quality of the score is one more indication that
Universal has attempted, with Ghost Story, to make the
top-flight horror-novel adaptation that many expected,
and failed to find, in The Shining. Whether the
enterprise succeeds depends largely on the skill of the
studio’s chosen director.

Irvin, who began his career in British television, has
a reputation in the U.S. based primarily upon two
previous translations from novel to film, John LeCarre’s
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, filmed for the BBC and
televised here via PBS, and his first feature film, based
upon Frederick Forsythe’s Dogs of War.

Dogs of War opened earlier this year to strong
positive response among critics, excellent word-of-mouth,
and disappointing box office returns, a problem Irvin
suspects may be due to the film’s ad campaign. “I think
that perhaps if it had been presented to the public as
something more than a war story, had there been more
suggestion of the complexity of the film, it might have
found its audience,” he says. Indeed, it is Irvin’s way of

That winter the four are threatened by
apparitions of the dead woman
(sculpted by effects wizard Dick Smith).

handling the complexity of the material in Forsythe’s
and LeCarre’s novels that suggests he is just the man
to undertake Ghost Story.

For Irvin, his involvement with Ghost Story is a
deliberate attempt to counterbalance the political
concerns of his two previous films. “I started in English
television, which often has a very dark, fantastic side to
it,” says Irvin, “and I wanted to get away from the
international intrigue and physical violence.”

Prior to accepting the assignment and in the course
of developing the screenplay, Irvin never read more
than a few pages of Straub’s novel. “I read Larry
Cohen’s script, and Larry had the book so well
imprinted on this mind that I felt I could be more
helpful by asking the right questions . . . and I had a
pretty good idea of the sort of movie that I wanted to
make. Subsequently I did read the book, and it had a
feeling of cosmic evil, from outside any of the
characters, that I very much wanted to get away from.

“Early on I had said to Larry, ‘One: I believe in
ghosts; I think I’ve once seen one. And two: I think the
pain and evil that we do to each other is quite enough
to create a ghost, and that the evil in the world is a
consequence of people’s actions.’ I felt that, within

Town mayor Ed Wanderley (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) is the
first to fall victim to the Galli curse.

Contemplating his friend's fate, Dr. John Jaffrey (Melvyn
Douglas) has forebodings of his own impending death.

A strangely menacing little boy (Lance Holcomb), enslaved
by Galli’s spirit, is found lurking in the house where she
once lived.

Lawyer Sears James (John Houseman) meets with an
accident when he finds an unexpected passenger in the
back seat of his car.

Ghost Storv

As winter deepens, the remaining men are haunted by
visions of the malevolent spirit that was Eva Galli and Alma
Mobley ,

. and law partner Ricky Hawthorne (Fred Astaire) falls
prey to terrifying dreams.

those guidelines, we could bring out something quite
original and credible.”

The Screenwriter

Larry Cohen, Ghost Story’s screenwriter, takes the
credit “Lawrence D. Cohen” on his films, which serves
to distinguish him from Larry Cohen the director-
screenwriter, responsible for such potboilers as It’s
Alive and Full Moon High. Cohen began his career as a
New York film and theater critic, eventually bridging
the gap to Hollywood through assignments with fellow
New Yorkers Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. For
the former, he served as production executive on Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and for De Palma he wrote
the screenplay adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie.
Cohen is an enthusiastic reader of horror fiction,
particularly of King’s work, and his reaction to the
Ghost Story assignment is simply expressed. “I was
chomping at the bit to get started on it,” he says. “It
is an enormous and ambitious book, and, as a film, I
think it remains so, though obvious things had to be
done with the material in order to turn it from a
humongous five-hundred-page book into a two-hour
movie that has its own logic.”

In the men's last, desperate attempt
to free themselves from the decades-
old curse, Eva Galli is raised from her
watery grave.

Many of the changes wrought in the Straub story
are simple cinematic shorthand. One member of the
Chowder Society, Lewis Benedikt, has been eliminated,
though many of his traits have been incorporated into
the character of Edward Wanderley. Don Wanderley,
Edward’s nephew in the book, is now the man’s son.
These changes offer a tighter focus on fewer characters
at the story’s outset, and allows the Don Wanderley
character to enter the film at the very start, when he
returns to Milburn for the funeral of his brother.

The nature of the Galli spirit, and the circumstances
that bring her into being, are also very different from
the book. “In the movie, there’s a very fine line being
trod over whether Eva Galli is coming back by her own
will as an avenging spirit, or whether these men are
bringing her back by their guilt, their fear, their
closeness to death,” says Cohen. “The approach is much
more psychological, which allows the film to approach
the same level of complexity as the book, but in a
different way.”

Peter Straub tells us that he hasn’t read the film’s
script, though he was offered the opportunity, glanced
through it, and is familiar with many of the changes
that have been made. Naturally he’s hoping that the
feeling, if not all of the substance, of his original work
can be translated to the screen. “I know they
eliminated the shape-changing nature of Eva,” says
Straub, “and I know that they’ve changed certain
things to make it more a story about guilt. That’s okay
with me; it makes more sense as a film. But I do wish
they’d kept the ending!

“I hope that they can capture something of the
complexity of the book, the minuet of different parts of
the book filtering in and out. I also hope that it’s as
scary as I think the book is, without being nastily scary.
And I particularly hope that the film manages to
capture the Chowder Society, the affection that these
characters have for each other and the love that I, as
the novelist, have for them.

“I’ve met Larry Cohen, who apparently has a lot of
respect for the book, though I’m sure his adaptation
isn’t slavish. I’m pretty optimistic . . . But of course,
we’ll never know until we see it.” u)

TH E ESSENTIAL WRITERS

J. Sheridan LeFanu

by Mike Ashley

INTRODUCING THE SHY, RECLUSIVE DUBLINER
WHOSE IMAGINATION WAS HAUNTED BY CRAWLING HANDS,

MALEVOLENT

W ho would you say should be
regarded as the Father of
the Modern Ghost Story?
Edgar Allan Poe? He may have
brought the sf, horror and detective
short story into the world, but he had
little time for tales of ghosts. M. R.
James? By his day the modern ghost
story was already well established,
although he did much ;o improve the
field. Charles Dickens? He did much
in his day to popularize the ghost
story.

In my opinion there is only one
writer who can claim the title of
Father of the Modem Ghost Story:
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu. His writing
career spanned the years from the
days of the Gothic horror tales to
those of the psychological ghost
story, and not only is that develop-
ment evident in his fiction, it can be
attributed almost directly to it as
well.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan LeFanu
was born at the Royal Hibernian
Military School in Dublin on August
28, 1814, the second of three

children. The family was of Huguenot
stock, having fled from France a cen-
tury earlier. The very rare Memoir of
the LeFanu Family, written and

MONKEYS, AND VAMPIRE

privately printed by LeFanu’s
neph.ew Thomas in 1924, indicates a
notable family connection through
LeFanu’s paternal grandmother,
Alicia, who was the sister of the
famous dramatist Richard Brinsley
Sheridan (1751-1816), author of
School for Scandal.

LeFanu’s father was resident
chaplain at the Royal Hibernian
School (LeFanu had a clerical
background in common with M. R.
James, Arthur Machen, E. F. Ben-
son, and other writers on matters
macabre). In 1826 he became Dean of
Emly and Rector of Abington, and
the family moved to a new home,
which, though only six miles from
Dublin, was in the midst of the lovely
Irish countryside. Young Joseph’s
most impressionable years, however,
had been spent in the old city of
Dublin and in such suburbs as the
village of Chapelizod, which features
so strongly in some of his stories and
in his novel The House by the Church-
yard. In both town and country
LeFanu loved to hear the local folk
tales, many of which formed the basis
for his later stories.

LeFanu had a happy childhood,
and with his younger brother,

TEMPTRESSES.

Williams enjoyed playing practical
jokes. LeFanu retained his sense of
humor for most of his life; this is evi-
dent in certain of his early stories.
However, growing up in Ireland has
always had its problems, and it was
no different in LeFanu’s youth. The
children were directly involved in the
Tithe Riots that erupted between the
peasantry and the landowners in the
winter of 1830-31 but, on the whole,
when political passions were not run-
ning high, young Joseph and the
locals were usually the best of
friends. Such tales as “The White
Cat of Drumgunniol,” “The Child
That Went With the Fairies,”
“Stories of Lough Guir,” and “Ultor
de Lacy” owe their origins to these
childhood acquaintances.

-In 1833 LeFanu entered Trinity
College, Dublin. In the same year a
group of young students launched the
first all-Irish periodical, the Dublin
University Magazine. Its future and
LeFanu’s were united from the start.
In 1838 LeFanu’s first story, “The
Ghost and the Bonesetter,” appeared
in the magazine’s pages, and twenty-
three years later he became both its
editor and its owner— though by then
the paper had long since disassociated

J. Sheridan LeFanu

itself from the University. Most of
LeFanu’ s stories and novels first ap-
peared in the Dublin University
Magazine, yet, ironically, his best-
known tales first appeared elsewhere.

“The Ghost and the- Bonesetter”
is not typical of LeFanu’s fiction,
although it does reveal his sense of
humor and his knowledge of the local
tales and dialects. More typical was
his second story, “The Fortunes of
Sir Robert Ardagh,” a treatment of
the ever-popular Faustian theme,
which he would reuse in “The
Haunted Baron” and “Sir Dominick’s
Bargain.”

Over the next two years LeFanu
placed eleven stories and a set of
ballads with the Magazine, all
published anonymously and all pur-
porting to be true tales related to
Father Francis Purcell, parish priest
of Drumcoolagh in the south of
Ireland. After LeFanu’s death these
stories were collected and published
as The Purcell Papers (1880). The
stories vary in quality and content,
but one in particular stands out for
its power and originality, “A Strange
Event in the Life of Schalken the
Painter” (1839). Set in the seven-
teenth century during the appren-
ticeship of the Dutch painter Godfried
Schalken to Gerard Douw, it sets out
to interpret one of Schalken’s paint-
ings. Douw’s niece, Rose, is married
to the hideous Wilken Vanderhausen,
but in less than a year the girl
returns to her uncle— mad with fear,
pleading for a minister, and scream-
ing “ . . . the dead and the living can
never be one ....” The girl, left
momentarily alone, disappears after
“one last shriek, so long and piercing
and agonized as to be scarcely
human” and is never seen alive
again. In the story’s epilogue,
Schalken is visiting a church many
years later in Rotterdam. Overcome
with fatigue, he falls asleep, only to
be wakened by a female “clothed in a
light robe of white, part of which was
so disposed as to form a veil.” She
leads him to the vaults where he sees
a heavily curtained bed and “sitting
bolt upright in the bed, the livid and
demoniac form of Vanderhausen.”

Although Schalken is convinced
of the reality of his vision, and encap-
sulated it in his painting, LeFanu
deliberately contrived a second inter-
pretation: that this was a dream in-
spired by the surroundings. This

dilemma would become the trade-
mark of LeFanu’s best-known stories.

LeFanu graduated from Trinity
College with Honours in Classics and
began the study of law. He was a
noted debater and it was felt he
would have a distinguished career
when he was called to the Irish bar in
1839. But, to the disappointment of
owl. At this point LeFanu shows his
ability to create horror through im-
plication rather than direct descrip-
tion. Barton’s servant, who has just
left the fateful chamber, returns
along the corridor. He knows the
room is empty save for Barton, but:

to his amazement, he heard a
voice in the interior of the
chamber answering calmly, and
actually saw, through the win-
dow which overtopped the door,
that the light was slowly shift-
ing, as if carried across the
room in answer to his master’s
call.

As the story develops, the skep-
tical Barton is forced to believe in the
existence of the supernatural, but at
the same time LeFanu places as
much credence on Barton’s growing
madness, brought about through a
guilty conscience over a sailor’s death
several years before.

The reader is given the same
choice in “An Account of Some
Strange Disturbances in Aungier
Street” (later revised as “Mr Justice
Harbottle,” though with less effect),
published in 1853. He suggests that a
series of bizarre deaths may have
been caused either by supernatural
means or simply as the result of a fit,
drunkenness, or just plain accident.

In 1851 LeFanu and his family
moved into the house of his late
father-in-law at 18 (now 70) Merrion
Square, Dublin, described by Nelson
Browne in his study of LeFanu as
“the most splendid residential square
in Europe.” It was a happy if busy
time for LeFanu, and the house saw
the frequent visit of guests. Then in
1858 tragedy struck with the death of
his young wife, Susan. From this
date LeFanu became a virtual
recluse, withdrawing more and more
from society and earning himself the
nickname of the Invisible Prince. For
solace he turned once again to
writing novels and stories. In the re-
maining fifteen years of his life he
wrote at least a dozen novels and a

score or more shorter pieces. The
most impressive work of his career
by far dates from this time. In 1869
LeFanu sold the Dublin University
Magazine and devoted all his time to
writing.

In his essay on Sheridan LeFanu,
many, he abanconed the law for jour-
nalism. In 1841 he became the owner
and editor of the weekly Irish paper
The Warder, and the next year
bought The Protestant Guardian.
Over the years he acquired equal
shares in other papers, and their
management must have occupied
much of his time. In 1844 he married
Susan Bennett, the daughter of a
prominent barrister, and the years of
happiness that followed gave LeFanu
the peace of mind to concentrate on
his careers, both as a newspaper
proprietor-journalist and a writer.

He now turned his attention to
the novel form, with two historical
adventures set in Ireland’s turbulent
past, The Cock nnd the Anchor (1845)
and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh
O’Brien (1847). The public reception
was regrettably mild. As essayist
Stewart M. Ellis observed: “ . . . if
LeFanu had continued his series of
Irish historical romances, he might
have done for Ireland what Scott
achieved for Scotland: no writer has
ever been more ably gifted to under-
stand and interpret the forces,
spiritual and natural, of his romantic
native land.”

LeFanu thus concentrated on
journalism; over the next ten years
he produced only a handful of stories,
but it was at this time that his first
collection appeared. That book, Ghost
Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851),
is now extremely rare. It included
only four stories, “The Murdered
Cousin,” “Schalken the Painter,”
“The Evil Guest,” and one that ranks
among LeFanu’s best, “The “Watch-
er” (later retitled, rather irrelevantly,
“The Familiar”). “The Watcher”
relates the fate of a retired naval of-
ficer, Captain Barton, “an utter
disbeliever in what are usually
termed preternatural agencies,” who
finds himself a victim of certain inex-
plicable visitations. First, the incor-
poreal sound of footsteps following
him through the Dublin streets in the
dead of night, then fleeting visions of
the Watcher himself, whose face
“wore the stamp of menace and
malignity,” and at length to the final

Illustration by Elinors Blaisdell. from Tales of the Undead (Thomas V. Crowell. NY.) - 1947 by Elinore Blaisdell

LeFanu's classic tale "Carmilla” added
an element of lesbian eioticism to the
traditional vampire theme.

denouement, which, like the scene in
“Schalken the Painter,” takes place
in a room where the door has sudden-
ly become unaccountably jammed and
where Barton comes face to face with
his nemesis, now in the form of an
Stewart Ellis provides an interesting
description of LeFanu’s. working day
during this period. Apparently he
wrote mostly in bed at night by the
light of two candles. After a brief
sleep he would awake ai; about 2 A.M.,
and brew himself some strong tea,
and then write for a few more hours
“in that eerie period of the night
when human vitality is at its lowest
ebb and the Powers of Darkness ram-
pant and terrifying.” He rarely left
the house, taking what exercise he
had in the small garden. Only occa-
sionally at night, much like H. P.
Lovecraft, did he venture into the
town, usually to visit old bookshops in
search of writings on the occult.

LeFanu also began to revise
many of his earlier stories either as
new short stories or as episodes
within longer works. The novels are
styled more in the Gothic mode, their
pages pervaded by Gothic gloom,
suspense, and intrigue. There is little
of the supernatural in any of them
other than in isolated episodes or as
complete inserted stories. Thus, in
The House by the Churchyard (1861)
we find the self-contained tale, “The
Haunting of the Tiled House,”
regarded by Ellis as “the most terri-
fying ghost story in the language”
and the forerunner of all those
stories, about a vengeful, disem-
bodied hand. Elsewhere in the novel
is the horrific trepanning episode

about which Dorothy Sayers wrote:
“For sheer grimness and power there
is little in the literature of horror to
compare.”

Of LeFanu’s other novels, those
worth tracking down are Wylder’s
Hand (1864), Uncle Silas (1864), and
Guy Deverell (1865), all written dur-
ing a period of feverish inspiration
and ranking among the best novels of
mystery and suspense written during
the nineteenth century, comparable to
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and
The Woman in White, which were
written during that same decade.

But it was in the short story that
LeFanu proved the master, and in the
final years, as his mind was tormented
by vivid nightmares, he produced
three of the field’s greatest works.
They were gathered, along with two
revisions of earlier stories, into the
collection, In A Glass Darkly (1872).
The three stories are, of course,
“Green Tea,” “The Room in the
Dragon Volant,” and “Carmilla.”

“Green Tea” must rate as one of
the most frequently anthologized
stories of all time. It has achieved a
certain fame because of LeFanu’s use
of the character Dr. Martin
Hesselius, the forerunner of all
psychic detectives. Hesselius is of lit-
tle importance to the story, though,
being merely a device for continuity,
just as LeFanu had used Father
Purcell years earlier. The real impor-
tance of “Green Tea” is that it firmly
introduced the psychological ghost
story once and for all. It concerns the
unfortunate Reverend Jennings, who
like LeFanu becomes a regular
drinker of green tea, and thereafter
finds himself haunted by the specter
of a small black monkey with eyes
like “tiny discs of red’-’ and a manner
of “unfathomable malignity.” The
monkey is visible to him and him
alone, and although it departs for
weeks at a time, it always returns to
dash all hopes of salvation. Its con-
tinued presence over a period of
years drives the Reverend to
madness and suicide. There is much
in common between “Green Tea” and
“The Watcher,” but now LeFanu
seemed to be writing with intense
conviction. The story was as much an
expression of LeFanu’s inner dilem-
mas as the monkey was a manifesta-
tion of the clergyman’s supressed
frustrations.

“The Room at the Dragon

Volant” is not as well known as its
companions, because its length has
precluded its appearance in story col-
lections. Many agree, however, that it
is LeFanu’s best story, the normally
caustic Glen St. John Barclay going
so far as to call it “probably as
perfect a piece of narrative as any in
English.” LeFanu resorts to no
supernatural agencies in this macabre
mystery, but instead conjures up
several scenes of excruciating
suspense, especially at the climax
when the hero, Richard Beckett, hav-
ing been injected with a drug that
renders total immobility without im-
pairing awareness, lies helpless in a
coffin while his captors prepare to
bury him alive— an episode equal to
Poe at his best.

“Carmilla,” however, must rank
as LeFanu’s supreme achievement. It
was the first modern vampire story
and, as Glen Barclay observed,
“There was really no need for
anybody to write another vampire
story. Everything composed since has
been only a variation on the themes
developed in that novelette.” What’s
more, LeFanu trespassed into the
taboo areas of lesbianism, including
scenes that were somewhat shocking
to the Victorians. A quarter of a cen-
tury before Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
“Carmilla” included all the ingre-
dients of the traditional vampire
legend but with none of the brash in-
sensitivity of the Gothic approach,
and made all the more potent by the
succinctness of LeFanu’s narrative.

A year later, after the first
publication of “Carmilla,” LeFanu
was dead. In his last years he suf-
fered from a bad heart and was
troubled by persistent nightmares.
Stewart Ellis tells us of one he
reported to his doctor. It was of an
old, ruined mansion which threatened
to fall upon and crush the dreamer.
At the end, LeFanu’s doctor stood by
the dead man’s bedside and looked in-
to his terror-stricken eyes. “I feared
this,” he said. “That house fell at
last.”

LeFanu died on February 7, 1873
of a heart attack. He was fifty-eight.
Within a decade most of his works
were forgotten and it would be fifty
years before the industrious en-
deavors of M. R. James revived an in-
terest in LeFanu and showed us all
that LeFanu was indeed the Father
of Phantoms. 63

REQUIRED

READING

An Account of *Some

otrange Disturbances
i n Aungier ^Street

by J. *Sberidan Lefanu
STOKE THE FIRE, MULL SOME WINE,

AND USHER IN THE CHRISTMAS SEASON THE WAY THE VICTORIANS DID,
WITH THIS CLASSIC HAUNTED-HOUSE TALE BY A MASTER OF THE FORM.

I t is not worth telling, this story of mine— at
least, not worth writing. Told, indeed, as I have
sometimes been called Upon to tell it, to a circle
of intelligent and eager faces, lighted up by a good
after-dinner fire on a winter’s evening, with a cold
wind rising and wailing outside, and all snug and
cosy within, it has gone off— though I say it, who
should not— indifferent well. But it is a venture to
do as you would have me. Pen, ink, and paper are
cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a “reader”
decidedly a more critical animal than a “listener.”
If, however, you can induce your friends to read it
after nightfall, when the fireside talk has run
for a while or 'g tales of shapeless terror; in

short, if you win secure me the mollia tempora
fandi, I will go to my work, and say my say, with
better heart. Well, then, these conditions pre-
supposed, I shall waste no more words, but tell you
simply how it all happened.

My cousin (Tom Ludlow) and I studied medi-
cine together. I think he would have succeeded, had
he stuck to the profession; but he preferred the
Church, poor fellow, and died early, a sacrifice to
contagion, contracted in the noble discharge of his
duties. For my present purpose, I say enough of his
character when I mention that he was of a sedate
but frank and cheerful nature; very exact in his
observance of truth, and not by any means like
myself— of an excitable or nervous temperament.

My Uncle Ludlow— Tom’s father— while we
were attending lectures, purchased three or four old
houses in Aungier Street, one of which was unoccu-
pied. He resided in the country, and Tom proposed
that we should take up our abode in the untenanted
house, so long as it should continue unlet; a move
which would accomplish the double end of settling
us nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our
amusements, and of relieving us from the weekly
charge of rent for our lodgings.

Our furniture was very scant— our whole
equipage remarkably modest and primitive; and, in
short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as
those of a bivouac. Our new plan was, therefore,
executed almost as soon as conceived. The front
drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the bed-
room over it, and Tom the bs.ck bedroom on the
same floor, which nothing could have induced me to
occupy.

The house, to begin with, was a very old one.
It had been, I believe, newly fronted about fifty
years before; but with this exception, it had nothing
modern about it. The agent who bought it and
looked into the titles for my uncle, told me that it
was sold, along with much other forfeited property,
at Chichester House, I think, in 1702; and had be-
longed to Sir Thomas Hacket, who was Lord Mayor
of Dublin in James II’s time. How old it was then, I
can’t say; but, at all events, it had seen years and
changes enough to have contracted all that mys-
terious and saddened air, at once exciting and
depressing, which belongs to most old mansions.

There had been very little done in the way of
modernising details; and, perhaps, it was better so;
for there was something queer and by-gone in the
very walls and ceilings— in the shape of doors and
windows— in the odd diagonal site of the chimney-
pieces— in the beams and ponderous cornices— not
to mention the singular solidity of all the wood-
work, from the banisters to the window-frames,
which hopelessly defied disguise, and would have
emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any
conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish.

An effort had, indeed, been made, to the ex-
tent of papering the drawing-rooms; but somehow,
the paper looked raw and out of keeping; and the
old woman, who kept a little dirt-pie of a shop in
the lane, and whose daughter— a girl of two and
fifty— was our solitary handmaid, coming in at sun-

rise, and chastely receding again as soon as she had
made all ready for tea in our state apartment; —this
woman, I say, remembered it, when old Judge Hor-
rocks (who, having earned the reputation of a parti-
cularly “hanging judge,” ended by hanging himself,
as the coroner’s jury found, under an impulse of
“temporary insanity,” with a child’s skipping rope,
over the massive old banisters) resided there, enter-
taining good company, with fine venison and rare
old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms
were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut
i a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms.

The bedrooms w ere wainscoted, but the front

> one was not gloomy; and in it the cosiness of anti-

> quity quite overcame its sombre associations. But
I the back bedroom, with its two queerly-placed
i melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of
! the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in

most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly
closet, which, from congeniality of temperament,
had amalgamated with the bedchamber, and dis-
solved the partition. At night-time, this “alcove”—
as our “maid” was wont to call it— had, in my eyes,
a specially sinister and suggestive character. Tom’s
distant and solitary candle glimmered vainly into its
darkness. There it was always overlooking him—
always itself impenetrable. But this was only part
of the effect. The whole room was, I can’t tell how,
repulsive to me. There was, I suppose, in its propor-
tions and features, a latent discord— a certain mys-
terious and indescribable relatiort, which jarred
indistinctly upon some secret sense of the fitting
and the safe, and raised indefinable suspicions and
apprehensions of the imagination. On the whole, as
I began by saying, nothing could have induced me
to pass a night alone in it.

“It is quite plain
that this dirty old house
disagrees with us both,
and hang me
if I stay here
any longer!”

I had never pretended to conceal from poor
Tom my superstitious weakness; and he, on the
other hand, most unaffectedly ridiculed my tremors.
The sceptic was, however, destined to receive a les-
son, as you shall hear.

We had not been very long in occupation of
our respective dormitories, when I began to com-
plain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I
suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance,
as I was usually a sound sleeper, and by no means
prone to nightmares. It was now, however, my des-
tiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose,
every night to “sup full of horrors.” After a pre-
liminary course of disagreeable and frightful
dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the
same vision, without an appreciable variation in a
single detail, visited me at least (on an average)
every second night in the week. f

Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illu-
sion— which you please— of which I was the
miserable sport, was on this wise:—

I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abomi-
nable distinctness, although at the time in profound
darkness, every article of furniture and accidental
arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as
you know, is incidental to ordinary nightmare. Well,
while in this clairvoyant condition, which seemed
but the lighting up of the theatre in which was to
be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror,
which made my nights insupportable, my attention
invariably became, I know not why, fixed upon the
windows opposite the food of my bed; and uniform-
ly with the same effect, a sense of dreadful antici-
pation always took slow but sure possession of me.
I became somehow conscious of .a sort of horrid but
undefined preparation going forward in some un-
known quarter, and by some unknown agency, for
my torment; and, after an interval, which always
seemed to me of the same length, a picture sudden-
ly flew up to the window, where it remained fixed,
as if by an electrical attraction, and my discipline of
horror when commenced, to last perhaps for hours.
The picture thus mysteriously glued to the window-
panes, was the portrait of an old man, in a crimson
flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I
could now describe, with a countenance embodying
a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and
power, but withal sinister and full of malignant
omen. His nose was hooked, like the beak of a vul-
ture; his eyes large, grey, and prominent, and

lighted up with a more than mortal cruelty and
coldness. These features were surmounted by a
crimson velvet cap, the hair that peeped from under
which was white with age, while the eyebrows re-
tained their original blackness. Well I remember
every line, hue, and shadow of that stony counte-
nance, and well I may! The gaze of this hellish
visage was fixed upon me, and mine returned it
with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare,
what appeared to me to be hours of agony. At
last—

The cock he crew, away then flew

the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful
watches of the night; and, harassed and nervous, I
rose to the duties of the day.

I had— I can’t say exactly why, but it may
have been from the exquisite anguish and profound
impressions of unearthly horror, with which this
strange phantasmagoria was associated— an insur-
mountable antipathy to describing the exact nature
of my nightly troubles to my friend and comrade.
Generally, however, I told him that I was haunted
by abominable dreams; and, true to the imputed
materialism of medicine, we put our heads together
to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a
tonic.

I will do this tonic justice, and frankly admit
that the accursed portrait began to intermit its
visits under its influence. What of that? Was this
singular apparition— as full of character as of ter-
ror— therefore the creature of my fancy, or the in-
vention of my poor stomach? Was it, in short, sub-
jective (to borrow the technical slang of the day)
and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an
external agent? That, good friend, as we will both
admit, by no means follows. The evil spirit, who en-
thralled my senses in the shape of that portrait,
may have been just as near me, just as energetic,
just as malignant, though I saw him not. What
means the whole moral code of revealed religion
regarding the due keeping of our own bodies,
soberness, temperance, etc.? here is an obvious con-
nexion between the material find the invisible; the
healthy tone of the system, and its unimpaired
energy, may, for aught we can tell, guard us
against influences which would otherwise render
life itself terrific. The mesmerist and the electro-
biologist will fail upon an average with nine pa-
tients out of ten— so may the evil spirit. Special con-
ditions of the corporeal system are indispensable to
the production of certain spiritual phenomena. The
operation succeeds sometimes— sometimes fails—
that is all.

I found afterwards that my would-be sceptical
companion had his troubles too. But of these I knew
nothing yet. One night, for a wonder, I was sleep-

ing soundly, when 1 was roused by a step on the
lobby outside my room, followed by the loud clang
of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick,
flung with all his force by poor Tom Ludlow over
the banisters, and rattling with a rebound down the
second flight of stairs; and almost concurrently with
this, Tom burst open my door, and bounced into
my room backwards, in a state of extraordinary
agitation.

I had jumped out of bed and clutched him by
the arm before I had any distinct idea of my own
whereabouts. There we were— in our shirts— stand-
ing before the open door— staring through the great
old banister opposite, at the lobby window, through
which the sickly light of a clouded moon was
gleaming.

“What’s the matter, Tom? What’s the matter
with you? What the devil’s the matter with you
Tom?” I demanded, shaking him with nervous im-
patience.

He took a long breath before he answered me,
and then it was not very coherently.

“It’s nothing, nothing at all— did I speak?—
what did I say?— where’s the candle, Richard?
It’s dark; I— I had a candle!”

“Yes, dark enough,” I said; “but what’s the
matter?— what is it?— why don’t you speak, Tom?
—have you lost your wits?— what’s the matter?”

“The matter?— oh, it is all over. It must have
been a dream— nothing at all but a dream— don’t
you think so? It could not be anything more than a
dream.”

“Of course,” said I, feeling uncommonly ner-
vous, “it was a dream.”

“I thought,” he said, “there was a man in my
room, and— and I jumped out of bed; and— and—
where’s the candle?’’

“In your room, most likely,” I said, “shall I
go and bring it?”

“No; stay here— don’t go; it’s no matter—
don’t, I tell you; it was all a dream. Bolt the door,
Dick; I’ll stay here with you— I feel nervous. So,
Dick, like a good fellow, light your candle and open
the window— I am in a shocking state.”

I did as he asked me, and robing himself like
Granuaile in one of my blankets, he seated himself
close beside my bed.

Everybody knows how contagious is fear of
all sorts, but more especially that particular kind of
fear under which poor Tom was at that moment
labouring. I would not have heard, nor I believe
would he have recapitulated, just at that moment,
for half the world, the details of the hideous vision
which had so unmanned him.

“Don’t mind telling me anything about your
nonsensical dream, Tom,” said I, affecting con-
tempt, really in a, panic; “let us talk about

His eyes lighted up with a more than mortal
cruelty and coldness.

something else; but it is quite plain that this dirty
old house disagrees with us both, and hang me if I
stay here any longer, t» be pestered with indiges-
tion and— and— bad nights, so we may as well look
out for lodgings— don’t you think so?— at once.”

Tom agreed, and, after an interval, said—

“I have been thinking, Richard, that it is a
long time since I saw my father, and I have made
up my mind to go down tomorrow and return in a
day or two, and you can take rooms for us in the
meantime.”

I fancied that this resolution, obviously the
result of the vision which had so profoundly scared
him, would probably vanish next morning with the
damps and shadows of night. But I was mistaken.
Off went Tom at peep of day to the country, having
agreed that so soon as I had secured suitable lodg-
ings, I was to recall him by letter from his visit to
my Uncle Ludlow.

Now, anxious as I was to change my quarters,
it so happened, owing to a series of petty pro-
crastinations and accidents, that nearly a week
elapsed before my bargain was made and my letter
of recall on the wing to Tom; and, in the meantime,
a trifling adventure or two had occurred to your
humble servant, which, absurd as they now appear,
diminished by distance, did certainly at the time
serve to whet my appetite for change considerably.

A night or two after the departure of my
comrade, I was sitting by my bedroom fire, the
door locked, and the ingredients of a tumbler of hot

I saw the infernal gaze
and the accursed countenance
of my old friend
in the portrait,
transfused into the visage
of the bloated vermin
before me.

whisky-punch upon the crazy spider-table; for, as
the best mode of keeping the

Black spirits and white,

Blue spirits and grey,

with which I was environed, at bay, I had adopted
the practice recommended by the wisdom of my
ancestors, and “kept my spirits up by pouring
spirits down.” I had thrown aside my volume of
Anatomy, and was treating myself by way of a
tonic, preparatory to my punch and bed, to half-a-
dozen pages of the Spectator, when I heard a step
on the flight of stairs descending from the attics. It
was two o’clock, and the stifeets were as silent as a
churchyard— the sounds were, therefore, perfectly
distinct. There was a slow, heavy tread, charac-
terised by the emphasis and deliberation of age,
descending by the narrow staircase from above;
and, what made the sound more singular, it was
plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly
bare, measuring the descent with something be-
tween a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear.

I knew quite well that my attendant had gone
away many hours before, and that nobody but
myself had any business in the house. It was quite
plain also that the person who was coming down
stairs had no intention whatever of concealing his
movements; but, on the contrary, appeared dis-
posed to make even more noise, and proceed more
deliberately, than was at all necessary. When the
step reached the foot of the stairs outside my room,
it seemed to stop; and I expected every moment to
see my door open spontaneously, and give admis-
sion to the original of my detested portrait. I was,
however, relieved in a few seconds by hearing the
descent renewed, just in the same manner, upon the
staircase leading down to the drawing-rooms, and
thence, after another pause, down the next flight,
and so on to the hall, whence I heard no more.

Now, by the time the sound had ceased, I was
wound up, as they say, to a very unpleasant pitch of
excitement. I listened, but there was not a stir. I
screwed up my courage to a decisive experi-
ment-opened my door, and in a stentorian voice
bawled over the banisters, “Who’s there?” There
was no answer but the ringing of my own voice
through the empty old house,— no renewal of the
movement; nothing, in short, to give my unpleasant
sensations a definite direction. There is, I think,
something most disagreeably disenchanting in the

sound of one’s own voice under such circumstances,
exerted in solitude, and in vain. It redoubled my
sense of isolation, and my misgivings increased on
perceiving that the door, which I certainly thought
I had left open, was closed behind me; in a vague
alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again
into my room as quickly as I could, where I re-
mained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very
uncomfortable indeed, till morning.

Next night brought no return of my bare-
footed fellow-lodger; but the night following, being
in my bed, and in the dark— somewhere, I suppose,
about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard
the old fellow again descending from the garrets.

This time I had had my punch, and the morale
of the garrison was consequently excellent. I
jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed
the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the
lobby. The sound had ceased by this time— the dark
and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror,
when I saw, or thought I saw, a black monster,
whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not
say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lob-
by, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes
shining dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and con-
fess that the cupboard which displayed our plates
and cups stood just there, though at the moment I
did not recollect it. At the same time I must honest-
ly say, that making every allowance for an excited
imagination, I never could satisfy myself that I was
made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for
this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape,
as if in the act of incipient transformation, began,
as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon
me in its original form. From an instinct of terror
rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all
my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid
crash made my way into my room, and double-
locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard
the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the
sound ceased in the hall, as on the former occasion.

If the apparition of the night before was an
ocular delusion of my fancy sporting with the dark
outlines of our cupboard, and if its horrid eyes were
nothing but a pair of inverted teacups, I had, at all
events, the satisfaction of having launched the
poker with admirable effect, and in true “fancy”
phrase, “knocked its two daylights into one,” as
the commingled fragments of my tea-service
testified. I did my best to gather comfort and
courage from these evidences; but it would not do.
And then what could I say of those horrid bare feet,
and the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, which
measured the distance of the entire staircase
through the solitude of my haunted dwelling, and at
an hour when no good influence was stirring? Con-
found it!— the whole affair was abominable. I was
out of spirits, and dreaded the approach of night.

It came, ushered ominously in with a thunder-
storm and dull torrents of depressing rain. Earlier
than usual the streets grew silent; and by twelve
o’clock nothing but the comfortless pattering of the
rain was to be heard.

I made myself as snug as I could. I lighted
two candles instead of one. I forswore bed, and held
myself in readiness for a sally, candle in hand; for,
coute qui coute, I was resolved to see the being, if
visible at all, who troubled the nightly stillness of
my mansion. I was fidgetty and nervous and tried
in vain to interest myself with my books. I walked
up and down my room, whistling in turn martial
and hilarious music, and listening ever and anon for
the dreaded noise. I sate down and stared at the
square label on the solemn and reserved-looking
black bottle, until “FLANAGAN & CO’S BEST OLD
MALT WHISKY” grew into a sort of subdued accom-
paniment to all the fantastic and horrible specula-
tions which chased one another through my brain.

Silence, meanwhile, grew more silent, and
darkness darker. I listened in vain for the rumble of
a vehicle, or the dull clamour of a distant row.
There was nothing but the sound of a rising wind,
which had succeeded the thunder-storm that had
travelled over the Dublin mountains quite out of
hearing. In the middle of this great city I began to
feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows
what beside. My courage was ebbing. Punch,
however, which makes beasts of so many, made a
man of me again— just in time to hear with toler-
able nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked
feet deliberately descending the stairs again.

I took a candle, not without a tremour. As I
crossed the floor I tried to extemporise a prayer,
but stopped short to listen, and never finished it.
The steps continued. I confess I hesitated for some
seconds at the door before I took heart of grace and
opened it. When I peeped out the lobby was perfect-
ly empty— there wels no monster standing on the
staircase; and as the detested sound ceased, I was
reassured enough to venture forward nearly to the
banisters. Horror of horrors! within a stair or two
beneath the spot where I stood the unearthly tread
smote the floor. My eye caught something in mo-
tion; it was about the size of Goliath’s foot— it was
grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from
one step to another, As I am alive, it was the most
monstrous grey rat I ever beheld or imagined.

Shakespeare says— “Some men there are can-
not abide a gaping pig, and some that are mad if
they behold a cat.” I went well-nigh out of my wits
when I beheld this rat; for, laugh at me as you may,
it fixed upon me, I thought, a perfectly human ex-
pression of malice; and, as it shuffled about and
looked up into my face almost from between my
feet, I saw, I could swear it— I felt it then, and
know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed

This apparition began to advance upon me . . .

countenance of my old friend in the portrait,
transfused into the visage of the bloated vermin
before me.

I bounced into my room again with a feeling
of loathing and horror I cannot describe, and locked
and bolted my door as if a lion had been at the
other side. D— n him or it; curse the portrait and its
original! I felt in my soul that the rat— yes, the rat,
the RAT I had just seen, was that evil being in
masquerade, and rambling through the house upon
some infernal night lark.

Next morning I was early trudging through
the miry streets; and, among other transactions,
posted a peremptory note recalling Tom. On my
return, however, I found a note from my absent
“chum,” announcing his intended return next day. I
was doubly rejoiced at this, because I had succeeded
in getting rooms; and because the change of scene
and return of my comrade were rendered specially
pleasant by the last night’s half ridiculous half hor-
rible adventure.

I slept extemporaneously in my new quarters
in Digges’ Street that night, and next morning
returned for breakfast to the haunted mansion,
where I was certain Tom would call immediately on
his arrival.

I was quite right— he came; and almost his
first question referred to the primary object of our
change of residence.

“Thank God,” he said with genuine fervour,
on hearing that all was arranged. “On your account
I am delighted. As to myself, I assure you that no

*StrangeDisturbances

earthly consideration could have induced me ever
again to pass a night in this disastrous old house.”

“Confound the house!” I ejaculated, with a
genuine mixture of fear and detestation, “we have
not had a pleasant hour since we came to live
here”; and so I went on, and related incidentally
my adventure with the plethoric old rat.

“Well, if that were all,” said my cousin,
affecting to make light of the matter, “I don’t think
I should have minded it very much.”

“Ay, but its eye— its countenance, my dear
Tom,” urged I; “if you had seen that, you would
have felt it might be anything but what it seemed.”

“I inclined to think the best conjurer in such
a case would be an able-bodied cat,” he said, with a
provoking chuckle.

“But let us hear your own adventure,” I said

tartly.

At this challenge he looked uneasily round
him. I had poked up a very unpleasant recollection.

“You shall hear it, Dick; I’ll tell it to you,” he
said. “Begad, sir, I should feel quite queer, though,
telling it here, though we are too strong a body for
ghosts to meddle with just now.”

Though he spoke this like a joke, I think it
was a serious calculation. Our Hebe was in a corner
of the room, packing our cracked delft tea and
dinner-services in a basket. She soon suspended
operations, and with mouth and eyes wide open
became an absorbed listener. Tom’s experiences
were told nearly in these words:—

“I saw it three times, Dick— three distinct
times; and I am perfectly certain it meant me some
infernal harm. I was, I say, in danger— in extreme
danger; for, if nothing else had happened, my
reason would most certainly have failed me, unless
I had escaped so soon. Thank God. I did escape.

“The first night of this hateful disturbance, I
was lying in the attitude of sleep, in that lumbering
old bed. I hate to think of it. I was really wide
awake, though I had put out my candle, and was ly-
ing as quietly as if I had been asleep; and although
accidentally restless, my thoughts were running in
a cheerful and agreeable channel.

“I think it must have been two o’clock at
least when I thought I heard a sound in that— that
odious dark recess at the far end of the bedroom. It
was as if someone was drawing a piece of cord
slowly along the floor, lifting it up, and dropping it
softly down again in coils. I sate up once or twice in
my bed, but could see nothing, so I concluded it
must be mice in the wainscot. I felt no emotion
graver than curiosity, and after a few minutes
ceased to observe it.

“While lying in this state, strange to say;
without at first a suspicion of anything super-
natural, on a sudden I saw an old man, rather stout

and square, in a sort of roan-red dressing gown,
and with a black cap on his head, moving stiffly and
slowly in a diagonal direction, from the recess,
across the floor of the bedroom, passing my bed at
the foot, and entering the lumber-closet at the left.
He had something under his arm; his head hung a
little at one side; and, merciful God! when I saw his
face.”

Tom stopped for a while, and then said—

“That awful countenance, which living or dy-
ing I never can forget, disclosed what he was.
Without turning to the right or left, he passed
beside me, and entered the closet by the bed’s head.

“While this fearful and indescribable type of
death and guilt was passing, I felt that I had no
more power to speak or stir than if I had been
myself a corpse. For hours after it had disappeared,
I was too terrified and weak to move. As soon as
daylight came, I took courage, and examined the
room, and especially the course which the frightful
intruder had seemed to take, but there was not a
vestige to indicate anybody’s having passed there;
no sign of any disturbing agency visible among the
lumber that strewed the floor of the closet.

“I now began to recover a little. I was fagged
and exhausted, and at last, overpowered by a
feverish sleep. I came down late; and finding you
out of spirits, on account of your dreams about the
portrait, whose original I am now certain disclosed
himself to me, I did not care to talk about the infer-
nal vision. In fact, I was trying to persuade myself
that the whole thing was an illusion, and I did
not like to revive in their intensity the hated im-
pressions of the past night— or to risk the constancy
of my scepticism, by recounting the tale of my
sufferings.

“It required some nerve, I can tell you, to go
to my haunted chamber next night, and lie down
quietly in the same bed,” continued Tom. “I did so
with a degree of trepidation, which, I am not
ashamed to say, a very little matter would have suf-
ficed to stimulate to downright panic. This night,
however, passed off quietly enough, as also the
next; and so too did two or three more. I grew
more confident, and began to fancy that I believed
in the theories of spectral illusions, with which
I had at first vainly tried to impose upon my
convictions.

“The apparition had been, indeed, altogether
anomalous. It had crossed the room without any
recognition of my presence: I had not disturbed it,
and it had no mission to me. What, then, was the
imaginable use of its crossing the room in a visible
shape at all? Of course it might have been in the
closet instead of going there, as easily as it in-
troduced itself into the recess without entering the
chamber in a shape discernible by the' senses.

Besides, how the deuce had I seen it? It was a dark
night; I had no candle; there was no fire; and yet I
saw it as distinctly, in colouring and outline, as ever
I beheld human form! A cataleptic dream would ex-
plain it all; and I was determined that a dream it
should be.

“One of the most remarkable phenomena con-
nected with the practice of mendacity is the vast
number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of
all persons, we can least expect to deceive. In all
this, I need hardly tell you, Dick, I was simply lying
to myself, and did not believe one word of the
wretched humbug. Yet I went on, as men will do,
like persevering charlatans and impostors, who tire
I people into credulity by the mere force of reiteration;
so I hoped to win myself over at last to a comfort-
able scepticism about the ghost.

“He had not appeared a second time— that
j certainly was a comfort; and what, after all, did I
care for him, and his queer old toggery and strange
looks? Not a fig! I was nothing the worse for having
seen him, and a good story the better. So I tumbled
into bed, put out my candle, and, cheered by a loud
drunken quarrel in the back lane, went fast asleep.

“From this deep slumber I awoke with a
start. I knew I had had a horrible dream; but what
it was I could not remember. My heart was thump-
ing furiously; I felt bewildered and feverish; I sate
up in bed and looked about the room. A broad flood
of moonlight came in through the curtainless win-
dow; everything was as I had last seen it; -and
though the domestic squabble in the back lane was,
j unhappily for me, allayed, I yet could hear a pleas-
| ant fellow singing, on his way home, the then
popular comic ditty called, ‘Murphy Delany.’ Taking
advantage of this diversion I lay down again, with
my face towards the fireplace, and closing my eyes,
j did my best to think of nothing else but the song,
j which was every moment growing fainter in the
| distance:—

’Twas Murphy Delany, so funny and frisky,

Stept into a shebeen shop to get his skin full;

He reeled out again pretty well lined with whiskey,

As fresh as a shamrock, as blind as a bull.

“The singer, whose condition I dare say
resembled that of his hero, was soon too far off to
regale my ears any more; and as his music died
away, I myself sank into a doze, neither sound nor
refreshing. Somehow the song had got into my
head, and I went meandering on through the adven-
tures of my respectable fellow-countryman, who, on
emerging from the ‘shebeen shop,’ fell into a river,

I from which he was fished up to be ‘sat upon’ by a
coroner’s jury, who having learned from a ‘horse-
doctor’ that he was ‘dead as a door-nail, so there
was an end,’ returned their verdict accordingly, just
as he returned to his senses, when an angry alterca-

It was about the size of Goliath's foot.

tion and a pitched battle between the body and the j
coroner winds up the lay with due spirit and j
pleasantry.

“Through this ballad I continued with a weary j
monotony to plod, down to the very last line, and j
then da capo, and so on, in my uncomfortable half-
sleep, for how long, I can’t conjecture. I found
myself at last, however, muttering, ‘dead as a door-
nail, so there was an end’; and something like j
another voice within me, seemed to say, very faint- I
ly, but sharply, ‘dead! dead! dead! and may the
Lord have mercy on your soul!’ and instantaneously
I was wide awake, and staring right before me from !
the pillow.

“Now— will you believe it, Dick?— I saw the !
same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing j
at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not
two yards from the bedside.”

Tom stopped here, and wiped the perspiration
from his face. I felt very queer. The girl was as pale
as Tom; and, assembled as we were in the very
scene of these adventures, we were all, I dare say,
equally grateful for the clear daylight and the
resuming bustle out of doors.

“For about three seconds only I saw it plain-
ly; then it grew indistinct; but, for a long time,
there was something like a column of dark vapour
where it had been standing, between me and the
wall; and I felt sure that he was still there. After a
good while, this appearance went too. I took my
clothes downstairs to the hall, and dressed there,
with the door half open; then went out into the

>StrangeDisturbances

street, and walked about the town til morning,
when I came back, in a miserable state of ner-
vousness and exhaustion. I was such a fool, Dick, as
to be ashamed to tell you how I came to be so
upset. I thought you would laugh at me; especially
as I had always talked philosophy, and treated your
ghosts with contempt. I concluded you would give
me no quarter; and so kept my tale of horror to
myself.

“Now, Dick, you will hardly believe me, when
*1 assure you, that for many nights after this last ex-
perience, I did not go to my room at all. I used to
sit up for a while in the drawing-room after you had
gone up to your bed; and then steal down softly to
the hall-door, let myself out, and sit in the ‘Robin
Hood’ tavern until the last guest went off; and then
I got through the night like a sentry, pacing the
streets till morning.

“For more than a week I never slept in bed. I
sometimes had a snooze on a form in the ‘Robin
Hood,’ and sometimes a nd£> in a chair during the
day; but regular sleep I had absolutely none.

“I was quite resolved that we should get into
another house; but I could not bring myself to tell
you the reason, and I somehow put it off from day
to day, although my life was, during every hour of
this procrastination, rendered as miserable as that
of a felon with the constables on his track. I was
growing absolutely ill from this wretched mode of
life.

“One afternoon I determined to enjoy an
hour’s sleep upon your bed. I hated mine; so that I
had never, except in a stealthy visit every day to
unmake it, lest Martha should discover the secret
of my nightly absence, entered the ill-omened
chamber.

“As ill-luck would have it, you had locked
your bedroom, and taken away the key. I went into
my own to unsettle the bedclothes, as usual, and
give the bed the appearance of having been slept in.
Now, a variety of circumstances concurred to bring
about the dreadful scene through which I was that
night to pass. In the first place, I was literally over-
powered with fatigue, and longing for sleep; in the
next place, the effect of this extreme exhaustion
upon my nerves resembled that of a narcotic, and
rendered me less susceptible than, perhaps, I should
in any other condition have been, of the exciting
fears which had become habitual to me. Then again,
a little bit of the window was open, a pleasant
freshness pervaded the room, and, to crown all, the
cheerful sun of the day was making the room quite
pleasant. What was to prevent my enjoying an
hour’s nap here? The whole air was resonant with
the cheerful hum of life, and the broad matter-of-
fact light of day filled every corner of the room.

“I yielded— stifling my qualms— to the almost

overpowering temptation; and merely throwing off
my coat, and loosening my cravat, I lay down,
limiting myself to /iaZ/-an-hour’s doze in the un-
wonted enjoyment of a feather bed, a coverlet, and
a bolster.

“It was horribly insidious; and the demon, no
doubt, marked my infatuated preparations. Dolt
that I was, I fancied, with mine and body worn out
for want of sleep, and an arrear of a full week’s
rest to my credit, that such measure as half- an-
hour’s sleep, in such a situation, was possible. My
sleep was death-like, long, and dreamless.

“Without a start or feari'ul sensation of any
kind, I waked gently, but completely. It was, as you
have good reason to remember, long past mid-
night— I believe, about two o’clock. When sleep has
been deep and long enough to satisfy nature
thoroughly, one often wakens in this way, suddenly,
tranquilly, and completely.

“There was a figure seated in that lumbering,
old sofa-chair, near the fireplace. Its back was
rather towards me, but I could not be mistaken; it
turned slowly round, and, merciful heavens! there
was the stony face, with its infernal lineaments of
malignity and despair, gloating on me. There was
now no doubt as to its consciousness of my
presence, and the hellish malice with which it was
animated, for it arose, and drew close to the bed-
side. There was a rope around its neck, and the
other end, coiled up, it held stiffly in its hand.

“My good angel nerved me for this horrible
crisis. I remained for some seconds transfixed by
the gaze of this tremendous phantom. He came
close to the bed, and appeared on the point of
mounting upon it. The next insi;ant I was upon the
floor at the far side, and in a moment more was, I
don’t know how, upon the lobby.

“But the spell was not yet broken; the valley
of the shadow of death was not yet traversed. The
abhorred phantom was before me there; it was
standing near the banisters, stooping a little, and
with one end of the rope round its own neck, was
poising a noose at the other, as if to throw over
mine; and while engaged in this baleful pantomime,
it wore a smile so sensual, so unspeakably dreadful,
that my senses were nearly overpowered. I saw and
remember nothing more, until I found myself in
your room.

“I had a wonderful escape, Dick— there is no
disputing that — an escape for which, while I live, I
shall bless the mercy of heaven. No one can con-
ceive or imagine what it is for flesh and blood to
stand in the presence of such a thing, but one who
has had the terrific experience. Dick, Dick, a
shadow has passed over me— a chill has crossed my
blood and marrow, and I will never be the same
again— never, Dick— never!”

Our handmaid, a mature girl of two-and-fifty,
as I have said, stayed her hand, as Tom’s story pro-
ceeded, and by little and little drew near to us, with
open mouth, and her brows contracted over her lit-
tle, beady black eyes, till stealing a glance over her
shoulder now and then, she established herself close
behind us. During the relation, she had made
various earnest comments, in an undertone; but
these and her ejaculations, for the sake of brevity
and simplicity, I have omitted in my narration.

“It’s often I heard tell of it,” she now said,
“but I never believed it rightly till now— though, in-
deed, why should not I? Does not my mother, down
there in the lane, know quare stories, God bless us,
beyant telling about it? But you ought not to have
slept in the back bedroom. She was loath to let me
be going in and out of that room even in the day
time, let alone for any Christian to spend the night
in it; for sure she says it was his own bedroom.”

“Whose own bedroom?” we asked, in a
breath.

“Why, his — the ould Judge’s— Judge Hor-
rock’s, to be sure, God rest his sowl”; and she
looked fearfully round.

“Amen!” I muttered. “But did he die there?”

“Die there! No, not quite there,” she said.
“Shure, was not it over the banisters he hung
himself, the ould sinner, God be merciful to us all?
and was not it in the alcove they found the handles
of the skipping-rope cut off, and the knife where he
was settling the cord, God bless us, to hang himself
with? It was his housekeeper’s daughter owned the
rope, my mother often told me, and the child never
throve after, and used to be starting up out of her
sleep, and screeching in the night time, wid
dhrames and frights that cum an her; and they said
how it was the speerit of the ould Judge that was
tormentin’ her; and she used to be roaring and yell-
ing out to hould back the big ould fellow with the
crooked neck; and then she’d screech ‘Oh, the
master! the master! he’s stampin’ at me, and
beckoning to me! Mother, darling, don’t let me go!’
And so the poor crathure died at last, and the doc-
thers said it was wather on the brain, for it was all
they could say.”

“How long ago was all this?” I asked.

“Oh, then, how would I know?” she
answered. “But it must be a wondherful long time
ago, for the housekeeper was an ould woman, with
a pipe in her mouth, and not a tooth left, and better
nor eighty years ould when my mother was first
married; and they said she was a rale buxom, fine-
dressed woman when the ould Judge came to his
end;' an’, indeed, my mother’s not far from eighty
years ould herself this day; and what made it worse
for the unnatural ould villain, God rest his soul, to
frighten the little girl out of the world the way he

gazing at me with its stony and fiendish

countenance, not two yards from the bedside.

did, was what was mostly thought and believed by
every one. My mother says how the poor little
crathure was his own child; for he was by all ac-
counts an ould villain evefy way, an’ the hangin’est
judge that ever was known in Ireland’s ground.”

“From what you said about the danger of
sleeping in that bedroom,” said I, “I suppose there
were stories about the ghost having appeared there
to others.”

“Well, there was things said— quare things,
surely,” she answered, as it seemed, with some
reluctance. “And why would not there? Sure was it
not up in that same room he slept for more than
twenty years? and was it not in the alcove he got
the rope ready that done his own business at last,
the way he done many a betther man’s in his
lifetime?— and was not the body lying in the same
bed after death, and put in the coffin there, too,
and carried out to his grave from it in Pether’s
churchyard, after the coroner was done? But there
was quare stories— my mother has them all— about
how one Nicholas Spaight got into trouble on the
head of it.”

“And what did they say of this Nicholas
Spaight?” I asked.

“Oh, for that matther, it’s soon told,” she
answered.

And she certainly did relate a very strange
story, which so piqued my curiosity, that I took oc-
casion to visit the ancient lady, her mother, from
whom I learned many very curious particulars. In-
deed, I am tempted to tell the tale, but my fingers

>StrangeDisturbances

are weary, and I must defer it. But if you wish to
hear it another time, I shall do my best.

When we had heard the strange tale I have
not told you, we put one or two further questions to
her about the alleged spectral visitations, to which
the house had, ever since the death of the wicked
old Judge, been subjected.

“No one ever had luck in it,” she told us.
“There was always cross accidents, sudden deaths,
and short times in it. The first that tuck it was a
family— I forget their name— but at any rate there
was two young ladies and their papa. He was about
sixty, and a stout healthy gentlemen as you’d wish
to see at that age. Well, he slept in that unlucky
back bedroom; and, God between us an’ harm! sure
enough he was found dead one morning, half out
of the bed, with his head as black as a sloe, and
swelled like a puddin’, hanging down near the floor.
It was a fit, they said. He was as dead as a
mackerel, and so he could not say what it was; but
the ould people was all sui^ that it was nothing at
all but the ould Judge, God bless us! that frightened
him out of his senses and his life together.

“Some time after there was a rich old maiden
lady took the house. I don’t know which room she
slept in, but she lived alone; and at any rate, one
morning, the servants going down early to their
work, found her sitting on the passage-stairs,
shivering and talkin’ to herself, quite mad; and
never a word more could any of them or her friends
get from her ever afterwards but, ‘Don’t ask me to
go, for I promised to wait for him.’ They never
made out from her who it was she meant by him,
but of course those that knew all about the ould
house were at no loss for the meaning of all that
happened to her.

“Then afterwards, when the house was let out
in lodgings, there was Micky Byrne that took the
same room, with his wife and three little children;
and sure I heard Mrs. Byrne myself telling how the
children used to be lifted up in the bed at night, she
could not see by what mains; and how they were
starting and screeching every hour, just all as one
as the housekeeper’s little girl that died, till at last
one night poor Micky had a dhrop in him, the way
he used now and again; and what do you think in
the middle of the night he thought he heard a noise
on the stairs, and being in liquor, nothing less id do
him but out he must go himself to see what was
wrong. Well, after that, all she ever heard of him
was himself sayin’, ‘Oh, God!’ and a tumble that
shook the very house; and there, sure enough, he
was lying on the lower stairs, under the lobby, with
his neck smashed double undher him, where he was
flung over the banisters.”

Then the handmaiden added—

“I’ll go down to the lane, and send up Joe

The other end, coiled up, it held stiffly in its hand.

Gavvey to pack up the rest of the taythings, and
bring all the things across to your new lodgings.”

And so we all sallied out together, each of us
breathing more freely, I have no doubt, as we
crossed that ill-omened threshold for the last time.

Now, I may add thus much, in compliance
with the immemorial usage of the realm of fiction,
which sees the hero not only through his adven-
tures, but fairly out of the world. You must have
perceived that what the flesh, blood, and bone hero
of romance proper is to the rejpilar compounder of
fiction, this old house of brick, wood, and mortar is
to the humble recorder of this true tale. I,
therefore, relate, as in duty bound, the catastrophe
which ultimately befell it, which was simply
this— that about two years subsequently to my story
it was taken by a quack doctor, who called himself
Baron Duhlstoerf, and filled the parlour windows
with bottles of indescribable horrors preserved in
brandy, and the newspapers with the usual gran-
diloquent and mendacious advertisements. This
gentleman among his virtues did not reckon sobrie-
ty, and one night, being overcome with much wine,
he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned
himself, and totally consumed the house. It was
afterwards rebuilt, and for a time an undertaker
established himself in the premises.

I have now told you my own and Tom’s
adventures, together with some valuable collateral
particulars; and having acquitted myself of my
engagement, I wish you a very good night, and
pleasant dreams, (g

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e took the sled from his eleven-year-old son
and held- it close to his own chest. The elu-
sive feel of the smooth, lacquered wood in
his gloved hand brought a rush of memories. Sleds
hadn’t changed much in forty years. Well, maybe
this one was a little lighter-built, a little less
solid— the price had certainly gone up! But there
was the old name printed in red letters on the
center slat, there were the same metal parts
painted red and blue.

The man and his son stood in the center of a
deserted residential side street in a middlewestern
town. A thick layer of slick ice and tire-packed
snow lay on the asphalt pavement. Above the roof-
tops the western sky hung colorless, as the last bit
of sun slid below the horizon. The wine-dark shadow
of the earth was rising in the east.

“Watch this,” said the father, grinning
through the frigid air at the boy. The man began to
run in slow, clumsy steps. His heavy overshoes with
the loose metal fasteners thudded and clinked
against the ice. He ran faster, ignoring the dull

ache in his left hip. Clomp . . . clomp . . . clomp . . .
The cold air cut sharply down his throat. His lungs
burned as if he were inhaling fire. Clomp . . . clomp
. . . clomp . . . It’s the same street, he thought, the
same old neighborhood. Clomp, clomp, clomp. He
thrust the sled outward, leveling it. Clomp . . . The
runners clattered down on the ice and the father
fell heavily, belly down, on top of the sled.

There was an exhilarating, giddy feeling in his
gut as the sled slipped freely across the icy surface.
The gun-metal-colored ice and white patches of
snow shot along just inches below his face. Forty
years rolled back. It was the same. The same!
Behind him were the shouts of tire other children as
they ran and threw themselves clown on their sleds.
He heard them hit the ice, coming after him. Filled
with a new excitement, he dug his left toe into the
road and cramped the steering bar hard to the left.
The sled spun, lost momentum, and crunched to a
halt in the rutted snow along the gutter.

The street was empty except for his son, who
stood a half-block away.

I was only ten years old, the father thought,
forty years ago, right here on this street. It has
changed some, but not much. The houses are the
same ones, older, some needing paint and repair.
Yet, in the bleached winter twilight, the details
were indistinct and memory transcended fact as if
he were seeing his own face in a dim mirror. It
really hasn’t changed that much, he declared.

Dragging the sled behind, the father walked
slowly back to his son. The boy stood hunched and
shivering. “How about that?” exclaimed the father,
proudly, but somewhat at a loss for breath. “That’s
how we did it. Here, son, you try.” He held out the
sled at arm’s length toward the boy. “Come on.”

The boy took the sled reluctantly. “Dad, I
don’t ...”

“Do it just like I did,” said the father,
squeezing the boy’s thin shoulder.

The boy ran, fell on the sled and rolled off as
it squirted out from under him.

“Try again!” shouted the father.

Darkness slid silently beneath the skeleton

trees. A cold wind rattled the stiff branches and
sent hard, dry crystals of snow hissing over the ice.
A star began to gleam in the January sky.

Looking around, the man saw the house
where he had been born, where he had grown to
manhood. The kitchen windows at the back of the
house were yellow with warm light. Back then,
forty years ago, he thought, my mother would be
just now cooking supper. In about five minutes she
would call . . .

Once this had been a neighborhood of Poles,
Italians, and Irish. They were all gone. They had
lived their lives, raised their children, and died. The
children, after selling the houses to urban blacks
fleeing the big city ghettos, had moved to new
neighborhoods with streets named Heath Hill,
Windermere Way, and Mill Pond Road.

“Dad!” shouted the boy as he flew past on the
sled, “Daaaaad!”

“That’s it. That’s it!”

Of all the people here on this street now,
thought the father, only I remember. Why, this

0 | qSU and ^di/untM

street used to be full of kids on a winter evening.
Kids and sleds! I couldn’t wait to get home from
school, change clothes, get the sled from the
garage, and polish up the runners with a handful of
ashes that had been carried to the alley from the
coal-burning furnaces. Every house had one. And
there were the brick chimneys with plumes of gray
smoke drifting downwind. I can still remember how
that smoke flavored the air with the peppery taste
of brimstone. Oh, the hours of running up and down
this street. Hours? Was it hours, actually? In mem-
ory it seemed an age. A whole era. A gilded era!

How strange, thought the father. He felt as if
he had shrunk inside his body, as if he had put on a
suit of clothes far too large. It seemed that his mind
had retreated into the recesses of his skull and that
he was looking out through his eye sockets from
some distance back. He put his hand to his temple
and felt the blood throbbing. Voices and laughter
swirled past on the wind. *

With only a slight effort of will the father
knew that he could become, in a marvelous instant,
one with the past. He was filled with a transcen-
dent joy. An illumination of a brilliant magnitude
flooded his mind with a vision of time dispelled, of a
dimension unimaginable, of the myriad facets of an
infinite crystal. The sudden thought that he might
be dying momentarily chilled the ecstasy. No, not
death, he reasoned— metamorphosis! The facets
were cross sections of time, and all facets were
accessible. Like the butterfly rising from its
chrysalis and into the air, he could emerge into an
everlasting simultaneity. And, like the butterfly, he
could descend into the gardens of time. The warmth
and love beyond the two rectangular windows of
golden light, there in the kitchen of his house,
were only an effort away!

“Hey ...”

The father’s body snapped sideways as if it
had been in contact with a live electric wire.

“Dad! Are you okay?”

The father looked down into a small white
face glazed red on the nose and the cheeks by the
cold. Two sharp eyes peered up into his. “Dad,
what’s wrong?” asked the face, familiar, yet as dim
as a surfacing, long unremembered image.

“My God,” said the father in a harsh whisper,
“I forgot ...” His head jerked around, swiveling
along the length of the street.

“Dad, can we go? I’m cold.”

The father nodded, but stood, trying to com-
prehend what he had just experienced.

Puzzled, and a little frightened, the boy took
his father’s hand. “Dad! Let’s go home!”

The echoes of laughter, clattering runners,
and shouts of joy faded. The father pressed the

palm of his hand against his face.

“Let’s go home!” shouted the boy.

“Yeah, okay, son. We’ll go.”

“Not that way,” said the boy as his father
took a step toward the lighted house. “We parked
over there.”

“Right, over there. What am I thinking of?”
said the father, turning away in confusion. “You
. . . you know I used to live in that house, the one
with the lights, second from the corner.”

“I know,” said the boy impatiently, “you told

me.”

hey got into the car and the father put the
keys into the ignition. He took a deep
breath and glanced at his son from the cor-
ner of his eye. “I bet you think I’m sorta crazy ...”
he said with a forced laugh.

The boy didn’t answer. He looked straight
ahead.

“We used to play here a lot,” the father said
in a somewhat husky voice. “My friends ... in sum-
mer we rode our bikes, in winter it was sleds.
Sometimes, with the sleds, we’d hook a ride on the
bumper of a car and get a free ride for a block or
more.”

The boy shifted uneasily. “Where are they
now?” he asked. “Your friends ...”

“Well, I don’t know. I think some of them
have moved out of town, and one or two have, ah,
passed on . . . Son, I just wanted you to know about
this street, how it was ...”

The father looked out at the houses snugly
nestled in purple shadows. The r aked trees held the
darkening sky in a thousand skeleton fingers. My
street, thought the father, mine forever— where
yesterday and tomorrow are today— forever. A
wave of green washed around the car. It was sud-
denly summer. Then the gold and bronze leaves of
fall drifted by on the smoky breeze. He wanted to
tell his son about the magic of this street, but that,
he knew, was impossible. The street was his alone.
Someday, perhaps, his son would find his own
magic street.

The car eased out from the curb and glided
away. Its taillights grew smaller and smaller in the
distance. Overhead, the cold clear stars hung like
frosty diamonds above the treetops, exactly as they
had forty winters ago.

The street was very quiet. It lay frozen in a
backwater of time. The present was but a light, ice-
crusted patina on the past. Somewhere in the
distance a woman’s voice called a name again and
again across the snow-shrouded yards. Winter
darkness came, and then, after a while, the yellow
light in the two kitchen windows of the second
house from the corner blinked out. IS

: :04

Illustration by Chris Pelletiere

The

Autumn

Visitors

Frank Belknap Long

A BRAND NEW TALE OF LOVE AND TRANSCENDENCE
BY THE SUBJECT OF THIS MONTH'S TZ INTERVIEW.

I n early October everything about East Glencove vember, at least. Add surf-line jogging, discussions
suits me fine. Most of the beachfront cottages of both old and new books, and then, perhaps, sup-
are boarded up, and there comes a time when per on the beach.

I you can do without picnic litter bobbing about in the “Peter, you’ve browned the potatoes to per-

surf and the gleeful shouts of bathers returning fection. But the panfish could be a little crisper,
across the long, circular beach with their children Just two more flip-flops would have done the trick.”
turning somersaults on the sand. Fifteen or twenty minutes of relaxation in

If that should make me sound like a grouch, I beach chairs, with coffee mugs in our hands, listen-
hasten to add that Janice shares my preference for ing to the wind ruffling the sand and watching the
East Glencove at its early autumn best, with wood tide gain a half-inch in its slow climb up the beach,
smoke arising from the tall pines on the landward Then back to the cottage, amidst a scuttling of fid-
side of the village, and with nothing to obstruct the dler crabs, to sit on the porch while the twilight
view on the seaward side but an occasional flurry of deepens about us and the distant winking of harbor
nesting gulls above scattered rocks— stepping- lights precedes the coming of darkness and a
stones for a giant?— whitened by their droppings. wilderness of stars.

There was far more to it than that: serenity, We usually go inside at nine or nine- thirty,

an almost unbelievable kind of togetherness, with But on this particular evening there was a total
the rest of the world blotted out, the tube banished absence of mosquitoes and not the slightest chill in
—save for the briefest of news flashes— until No- the air, and there seemed to be a kind of unspoken

The Autumn Visitors

agreement between us to stay right where we were
for at least another hour.

I got up and opened the screen door just
enough to let Princess come bouncing out, then set-
tled down again at Janice’s side, wondering why
just patting the head of a shaggy dog could make a
great many women more talkative and warm. The
instant she nestled close to»me, I gave her waist a
sudden, tight squeeze.

“If you had one wish right now, what would it
be?” I asked.

“I think you know,” she said.

“Guessing is never quite the same thing as
knowing,” I said. “If you put what you hinted at
this morning in more positive terms—”

“All right,” she said, before I could go on.
“I’d like at least one more full year at the cottage.
Risk taking is good for us, and we’re still young
enough to afford it.”

Happiness, in the unaging years when
creative drives are at their peaks, can be afforded
in more ways than one, and I knew she didn’t just
mean economically. In fact, that consideration was
all-too-often absent from her thoughts.

“In the past six months I’ve sold only enough
paintings to take care of the basics, including the
rent,” I reminded her. “New England art dealers
are funny that way. They can be reckless one
season, overcautious the next.

“As a village handyman I’d be a complete
flop,” I added, for emphasis. “I’m more the Van
Gogh ear-slicing type.”

“Oh, come on,” she countered. “You’ve
enough resilience to be good at anything you under-
take, if it should ever come to that. It's me you’re
talking to.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I began—
and stopped.

Princess had gotten up and reached the door
in two long leaps. She was pawing at the screen,
the hair bristling along her back and a fierce growl
coming from her throat. What made it astonishing
was the simple fact that a household guardian she
was not, and would have greeted a burglar, under
ordinary circumstances, with the friendliest of tail
waggings.

I stopped Janice from leaping to her feet with
a whispered warning. “Stay put and don’t make a
sound. I think we have a visitor. Did you lock the
back door?”

“I did,” she assured me. “But the kitchen
window is open.”

“Don’t follow me before I make sure,” I cau-
tioned. “It could be a squirrel or a bat.”

I was at the door too quickly to give her a
chance to protest. The instant I flung it wide, Prin-
cess went streaking across the sun parlor to the liv-
ing room like a suddenly released attack dog.

The sun parlor was moonlight- flooded, but
there was nothing in it I could have used as a
weapon. My best bet, if I needed one— and I felt I
might— was the small bronze statue on a pedestal
just inside the living room, and as I felt along the
wall for the light switch I could hear Princess mak-
ing growling and scuffling sounds in the darkness.

The instant the light came on, I saw that
Princess was alone. She was running up and down
in front of the fireplace as if she had scented some-
thing unusual there, shaking the two unlighted logs
a little and scraping the bricks with her claws. High
above her the long, dangling legs of Dolly Madison
also shook a little.

A word as to Dolly Madison. It was easy to
think of her as a doll whittled from wood by human
hands, or even as a factory-manufactured toy. Ac-
tually she was neither. Janice had picked her up on
the beach and set her down on the mantel two
weeks previously with a prideful -discovery look, for
she delighted in pieces of driftwood so miraculously
shaped that they conjured up visions of a goblin-
haunted sea strand where all manner of night-
roaming shapes held revel and fled at the first flush
of dawn.

After a heavy storm, New England beaches
had many such driftwood treasures, but Dolly Madi-
son— the historical-sounding name had appealed to
Janice as both appropriate and amusing— came as
close as any natural object could to a perfectly
formed human doll, with evenly spaced knots for
eyes, a smiling mouth, and exceptionally long legs.

“Princess, be quiet!” Janice said, almost at my

For a moment
I thought the living room
was just as we
had left it.

Then I saw
that there was the
faintest of glimmerings
in the; direction of
the mantel.

Something was moving.

elbow, having ignored my plea that she remain a mo-
ment longer outside. “What in heaven’s name has
gotten into you?”

At the sound of her voice Princess ceased to
growl and rear up, and flattened herself against the
floor in unmistakable contrition.

“You took a foolish risk,” I told her. “Some-
thing must have excited her, and the kitchen window
is still open.”

“No, I just closed it,” Janice said.

It was hard to believe that some small creature
of the night could have flown— or crawled— in and
out again this quickly; so I bent without a word and
looked under the log;s in the fireplace.

Nothing.

“She was bristling with rage,” I said. “The
more I see of dogs and cats the more convinced I
become that they’re almost as crazy as people.”

“We can thank our lucky stars it wasn’t a
burglar,” Janice said. “You’re making too much of
it. I didn’t start the evening tired, but now I’d just
as soon go right upstairs to bed.”

We went upstairs together, with the kind of
understanding that required few words. It often
takes very little to spoil an evening, and I suddenly
felt just as tired. Princess got up at the same time
and ambled back into the sun parlor, and I had the
feeling she would soon be making brief growling
sounds in her sleep, as dogs often do when they’re
having bad dreams.

J anice was the first to fall asleep, perhaps be-
cause she was really tired and I had to work
at it. For ten or fifteen minutes I twisted
and turned, listening to the wind rattling the win-
dowpanes and counting the newest equivalent of
sheep— credit card figures emerging from a com-
puter that were plunging me deeper into the red
every time I stopped at a gas station.

Then, perhaps twenty minutes in all after
Janice had reached over and clicked off the light at
the head of the bed, I fell into a deep slumber. It
probably started off dreamless, because I lost, with a
split-second abruptness, all awareness of Janice as
a shining light at the center of my life— that cast a
radiance on the road ahead, making its occasional

rockiness seem less of a hazard.

I had no idea exactly what time it was when I
woke up. The bedroom was still in total darkness,
without the slightest hint of lightening in the region
of the windows. But I can usually tell when dawn is
not far away because there is a great difference
between a short and a long sleep, and there seems
to be something, deep in my mind, that records
time’s passing with some degree of exactitude, even
during slumber.

Happily or unhappily, as the case may be,
emotions can’t be clocked in the same general way,
and I felt excited and apprehensive immediately
without knowing why.

Without switching on the light, I fumbled
around in the darkness for my dressing gown, slip-
pers, and a pocket flash, and less than three
minutes later was descending to the living room in
a silence so absolute I could have heard a mouse
stirring.

For a moment I thought the living room was
just as we had left it. Then I saw that there was the
faintest of glimmerings in the direction of the
mantel. Something was moving, something directly
below Dolly Madison; I could just make out the dim
outlines of her driftwood torso and long, dangling
legs in what had ceased to be a region of inky
blackness.

When visibility is very faint, a few seconds of
intense staring can often make a barely visible ob-
ject stand out with greater sharpness, and the mov-
ing object suddenly became a small human figure,
arms outstretched, leaping up and down as if mak-
ing a frantic effort to reach Dolly Madison’s dan-
gling legs and pull her from the mantel. Turning
slowly toward me in the bright circle of radiance
was a little girl who could not have been more than
six or seven. She was blinking a little, but did not
appear startled, as if she believed herself still sur-
rounded by darkness. Though she was staring di-
rectly at me, she seemed all but unaware of my
presence.

I had never before seen a child’s face so radi-
ant, so classically beautiful. There was something
almost Grecian about it, as though it had been
taken from a buried urn by some ancient magician
and transformed into a flesh-and-blood reality. She
was barefoot and wore a flowing white gown of
silken texture without adornments of any kind, giv-
ing her an almost angelic aspect.

Suddenly, before I could take a step toward
her, she was gone. Where she had been I saw only
the bricks of the fireplace.

A ghost? I refused to believe it. My total skep-
ticism was reinforced by what I knew, from con-
siderable recent reading, about the nature of night-
mares. Nightmares come from a different part of
the sleeping brain than do ordinary dreams. They

The Autumn Visitors

are born in the dark underside of human conscious-
ness. Often frightful, they can occasionally embrace
aspects of breathtaking loveliness along with the
terror, perhaps in compensation for what would
otherwise be sanity-threatening.

Nightmares also leave penumbras. You may
awaken from one and, for several minutes, see a
very solid person standing at the foot of your bed.

Of course, for a penumbra to occur so belated-
ly, after I’d gotten up, taken a moment to fumble
around for my dressing gown, and descended the
stairs to switch on a pocket flash was, to say the
least, unusual. But it could not be ruled out as a
possibility, particularly after the bad time Princess
had put me through earlier that evening.

The nightmare possibility seemed greatly re-
inforced by the simple fact that Princess had failed
to awaken and come bounding into the living room
in hair-bristling agitation. Whatever had enraged
her earlier in the region of the mantel would have
had to be an occurrence of a different sort, for dogs
can sense a menace even when they are deep in
sleep, and she could hardly have mistaken an image
my entirely human mind had conjured up for an ob-
jective physical threat. Telepathy on that level
might conceivably exist, but I have always doubted
it.

Although the child’s lips had not moved when
the light had swept over her, five lines from Swin-
burne had come unbidden into my mind:

If the golden-crested wren
Were a nightingale, why then
Something seen and heard by men
Would be half as sweet as when
Laughs a child of seven.

To a painter, poet or musician there is only
one command tha't must be heeded: Get it down as
quickly as possible— on paper, canvas, or a musical
keyboard, as your calling dictates.

As I hurried across the living room to the
door of the disgracefully cluttered room I called a
studio, Princess awoke at last and came padding
out of the sun parlor. She sniffed around for a mo-
ment at the base of the mantel as if disturbed by
something that had been there, but her agitation
wasn’t remotely comparable to what it had been the
first time.

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “Your big moment
has passed.” Without waiting to see if she accepted
that as a command, I went into the studio and shut
the door.

A feeling of wonder and the creativity that so
often accompanies it could, I knew from experience,
pass quickly, and I lost no time in getting a drawing
board in place on one of the three tables and pin-
ning a sheet of drawing paper to it. I sketched
swiftly, almost casually, not striving too hard, in-
tent chiefly on capturing a certain look on the
78

child’s face as she had turned to gaze at me.

A few deft strokes made me feel that I was
doing very well indeed, and I was close to com-
pleting the sketch to my entire satisfaction when
Princess began barking again, just as loudly— and
fiercely— as she had done hours earlier.

I got up abruptly, almost upsetting the table,
and unpinned the drawing with shaking fingers. I
carried it with me as I strode to the door and flung
it wide. For some crazy reason I could not bear to
relinquish anything so precious after having sue- :
ceeded so well: with it.

Princess was no longer in sight, but I could
hear her still fiercely barking outside the cottage.
There was no mistaking her direction. I crossed the
living room in a swift stride and was running when
I passed through the sun parlor and out the front
door to the porch.

Princess was halfway down the beach, in clear
pursuit of three human figures that seemed to be
moving at least twice as rapidly, making it im-
possible for her to overtake them. Two of the
figures were quite tall and clearly those of adults.
One appeared to be a woman with a slim waist and
large hips, the other a man of heavier build and
broad, straight shoulders. They were carrying be-
tween them a very small figure who was twisting
and turning as if in violent protest at being hurried
off so relentlessly.

Beyond them— so close to the surf line that it
was occasionally washed at its base by a wave— a
wedge-shaped object at least th.rty feet in height
caught and held the moonlight. Despite the glow
which made it stand out against the night sky, it re-
mained as outwardly featureless as a shattered,
storm-tossed fragment of a ship, or it might easily
have been some other kind of wreckage. Still, in
some hard-to-define way, there was something dis-
turbing, different, about it.

Abruptly the tall figures came to a halt and
turned to look behind them, and in great, bounding
leaps Princess took advantage of that to shorten
the distance between them. Still barking furiously,
she was almost upon them when there was a flash
of light so blinding that I had to throw my arms
across my eyes to protect them from the glare.

When I took the risk of staring out across the
beach again, the light had vanished and Princess
was gone. Where her last furious leap had carried
her there was nothing but a slowly rising spiral of
smoke.

I’m far from sure exactly what mad impulse
prompted me to leap down from ;he porch and race
wildly across the sand in pursuit of what I could no
longer believe were merely phantoms of the mind.
Nothing had prepared me for this fiery destruction,
for a running, leaping dog that vanished in' a burst
of flame, and my mind was filled with a rage which

blinded me to all danger and made me feel that I
must know more.

The two tall figures had turned now, as if the
loss of my beloved pet had meant little or nothing
to them, and were continuing on toward the wedge-
shaped object, the very small figure still dangling
between them. Though her face was obscured by
the interplay of light and shadow close to the surf
line, I had no doubt at all that it was the child
whose wondrously rs,diant countenance I had seen
before. She seemed to be struggling even more
frantically to free her self, and it was easy for me to
picture her succeeding and fleeing back toward the
cottage in the moonlight, her tiny child’s voice shrill
with terror.

In no clearly conscious way did the thought of
rescuing and protecting her keep me racing after
the figures, for a phantom she still might have
been, despite all my reasoning to the contrary, and
no man with a firm grasp on reality goes to the
rescue of a phantom. But deep in my mind some
such thought must have been stirring, or my rage
would have been less overwhelming.

I was not very far from where Princess had
met her end when I laegan to feel the heat. I felt it
in my legs at first: a tingling warmth swiftly creep-
ing up my thighs and spreading through the lower
part of my body until it reached my chest. It soon
became agonizing— s.nd very frightening— in the
region of my heart, forcing me to come to an
abrupt halt, for I am not so young that the possibili-
ty of a coronary attack could be shrugged off as ex-
tremely unlikely.

When it failed to diminish, I swung about and
retreated back across the beach for twenty-five or
thirty feet. It became^ just a tingling warmth again.
I retreated a few feet more, and it was gone.

It was then that I heard the voice. In some
respects it was like el voice heard in a dream, loud
and quite distinct, but with something about it
which made it impossible for me to tell whether it
was coming from a distance or was close to my ear.
It could even have been a wholly subjective voice,
audible to me alone. 1 was only sure of one thing: it
was a voice too deep in timbre to have come from
the vocal cords of a woman, unless she were an
amazon indeed. There were pauses and breaks in it,
as if the speaker were experiencing difficulty in
overcoming some immense barrier.

“We have traveled far ... and . . . and . . .
this child is our child, ” came slowly, with a difficult

ty evident from the first. “Stubborn . . . headstrong
. . . and . . . and . . . too young to stay alert to
danger. If we had not found her in time—”

The voice paused, as if my look of stunned
disbelief had underscored the need for a less abrupt
beginning.

“Thought communication without energy ex-
change . . . energy contact . . . ceases to be a prob-
lem when once you understand that what you think
of as space is no more than a shapeless flowing. It
is without beginning or end, and thought alone
gives it substance and creates parallel universes
filled with a vast multitude of energized forms. In
our universe there is no matter . . . only matter’s
opposite. But both Eire forms of energy created by
thought alone.”

There was another pause, slightly briefer than
the first. “We have acquired some knowledge of
your speech . . . your customs . . . your habits of
thought. You are quick to doubt . . . but just as
quick to let doubt be replaced by understanding.

“Our child . . . lo£t a toy precious to her.
There are times when the yearning of the very
young . . . left desolate by loss . . . can break
through barriers that are protectively strong ... as
they set out on some small quest of their own. Our
child went roaming in search of her lost toy . . . and
discovered the shape on your mantel . . . The
resemblance was very close.

“From the sea it came, and there are . . .
thought patterns in your universe that are just as
close ... to the heart of a child. Pebbles oddly
shaped . . . shining shells ... Do not your children
stop as well . . . entranced . . . treasuring them as
playthings in their secret thoughts? And if one such
plaything should bear a close resemblance to a lost
bedtime companion . . . greatly loved ... do you
not see? She leapt up toward it, again and again,
but if she had touched it ... we would have been
left childless to grieve.”

For the third time there ensued a pause.
Perhaps the tall figure knew that a brief silence can
have an eloquence of its own when understanding is
being sought.

“There is a shop on one of your village streets
. . . filled with glassware and fragile antiques,” the
voice went on. “I am sure you have visited it more
than once. Just inside the door, as you know, there
is a sign which reads: Do not touch ... It was put
there to warn summer visitors to be csireful.

“We must be careful too. But unlike the sum-

The Autumn Visitors

mer visitors, we cannot touch anything in your
universe of stars and remain as we are. And if you
touch us, you too will be gone in a sudden burst of
flame. I have said that we are matter’s opposite,
and there is no way of preventing what happens
when the two collide.

“We travel with safeguards to warn and pro-
tect us . . . but a very young child can forget and
become careless. We were twice in the cottage
searching for her, and it was our presence that first
excited your dog. In its last leap it did not quite
reach us ... but it came too close. In such an
emergency . . . confronted by such a danger ... we
can widen the zone of destructiveness just enough
to make actual contact impossible for as long as the
threat exists. It is one of the safeguards. There are
several others ...”

The two tall figures were standing at the base
of the wedge-shaped object now, with the blaze of
star-fields incalculably mirrored in shifting patterns
on the incoming tide. The child had become quiet.

“In our universe, as in yours,” the voice pro-
claimed with unmistakable pride, “there can be no
rest for the exploring mind. To pursue knowledge
and seek to know more about the nature of
thought, we must dare greatly and travel far ...
refusing to turn back . . . though obstacles may
arise and griefs multiply ...”

The two tall figures seemed suddenly to move
even closer to the wedge-shaped object, or possibly
its shadowy bulk had moved closer to them. I could
only be sure of one thing. All at once, amidst the
glimmerings of the incoming tide, both the figures
and the object were gone.

F or a long moment, as I walked back across
the beach .to the cottage, staggering a little,
it was to doubt the reality of everything I’d
just seen and heard. Perhaps it had been too many
hours spent in the blazing summer sunlight on the
beach, in a man who had always been a little
careless about his health and had allowed himself to
forget that his robust self-image was inappropriate
beyond a certain age.

There are a few realities— not many, perhaps,
but a few— so incontestable that they withstand
every attempt to brand them as false; and this was
one. Princess was gone. Her presence on the beach,
her barking, had been too terribly real for me to
doubt what I had seen. Her final barks still echoed
in my ears; I still recalled the blinding flare of light
that had forced me to cover my eyes.

Was Janice still asleep? I hoped so. I would
climb the stairs, slip quietly between the sheets, and
take her in my arms, telling her simply that I had
heard a noise and gone downstairs to investigate.
Just that, and nothing more.

It was not to be.

The instant I ascended the porch I saw that
the light was on in the sun parlor and that she was
moving about close to the door. She must have
either seen me through the screen or heard me
moving on the porch, because before I could decide
what it might be best to tell her she came rushing
out with something in her hand that I immediately
recognized.

“Oh, darling, darling, where have you been?”
she asked. “And when did you make this drawing?”

I’d completely forgotten dropping the picture
in my alarmed dash across the sun parlor. But it
didn’t matter, I told myself. The loss of Princess
did matter, but that, too, could wait. I’d have to
make up some story, I knew, that would ease the
blow; it wouldn’t be the first time a dog had strayed
from a beachfront cottage and never been found.
Beyond the village there were— well, at least six
miles of unbroken woodland.

My wife gave me a quick, excited hug. “This
is the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“The next time you shut yourself up in that win-
dowless room you call a studio without telling me
that some wild kind of inspiration has taken hold of
you, I’ll start keeping secrets from you.”

“Well-”

She waved me to silence. “I could do that
now, but I’m not going to. I’m going to tell you
something that will rock you back on your heels. I
saw that same little girl in a dream tonight, and it
happened once before. I’d have recognized her face
anywhere. Oh, darling, darling, don’t you see? It
has to mean something important for— for both of
us. You’re a finer artist than you dream. This draw-
ing proves it for all time, and if we stay at the cot-
tage for another year—”

She broke off abruptly to stare out for a mo-
ment across the beach, as if she saw on its shining
expanse, in ghostly form, the clambakes we’d en-
joyed in the past and could enjoy again, and the
dolphins sporting playfully between the rock islands
just beyond, silvered by the moonlight now, but
sun-gilded at dawn.

But it wasn’t the clambakes or the dolphins or
the now nesting gulls that she saw when she spoke
again.

“We’ve both always wanted children, but
we’ve let foolish things stand in the way. The fear
that because we married late we’re too old to take
on such a responsibility, and the uncertainties of
childbearing at my age. But I’ve a strong feeling
now that if we stay here just one more year— per-
haps much longer, but at least another year— some-
thing quite glorious will happen.”

Abruptly, without saying a word, I put my
arms around her and held her so tightly that she
winced. It was one of those miraculous moments
when disagreements dwindle to the vanishing point.

Illustration by Nicola Cuti

GOD HELP US, IT'S ANOTHER ADAM-AND-EVE STORY-
AND AT LONG LAST, ONE THAT MAKES SENSE!

; This is the way it was told for the last time:

H is days were full of work, but the life here
was good. Each day brought new discover-
ies. On his long, strong legs he ranged far
I over this unfamiliar world, feeding a curiosity that
grew with each day’s nourishment. The woman,
j too, devoted her time to exploring, and between
i them they had already learned much about their
j new home.

After his long day of questing he returned
j hungry and dusty, but in good spirits. She had come
back before him, and at the sight of him she
| brought out food. As they ate, he told her of his
day’s findings.

“Did you see any new animals?” she asked.
“Some flying creatures. They’re beautiful
things.”-

“Take me with you tomorrow. I want to see
them.”

“You can name them. You’re better at that
than I am.”

When they finished eating, he asked, “Did
you find anything new by the river?”

She smiled and shook her head, and the long
waves of her hair moved gently to brush first one
side of her face, then the other. She swept her hair
back over her bare shoulders and said, “I didn’t go
to the river. I went up the mountain.”

“To the top?”

“To the very top.”

He had been reclining or an elbow. At her
news, he sat up and reached out to her in a quick
gesture, not of anger but of concern. “You know
the law. At-the top of the mountain . . . you should
never go there. Not alone, certainly.”

She rose lightly to her feet and tugged at his
hand. “Come up with me, then, and see what I have
to show you.”

“The mountaintop is not a good place. Not
even when we’re together.”

“There’s no danger. I knew there isn’t.”

He still did not move. “The light ...” he said
uncertainly.

“The light will be with us for a long time.
Come.” She tugged again, and he reluctantly arose
and followed her up the gentle slope.

They reached the clearing on the mountaintop j

swept through him at the sight of her. He was not
sure how long they had been together, but since
that first drowsy afternoon when he awoke and
found her beside him, her head nestled in the crook
of his outflung arm, he had never looked on her
with the feeling he now felt. The glow of her
smooth skin, the soft curves of her shoulders and
breasts, the round smoothness of her belly, the long
gentle line of her thighs were as new sights to him,
and the look in her eyes drew him closer. He placed
his hands on her shoulders and pulled her to him.

“You are the most beautiful of all things liv-
ing. I never saw this before, but I see it now,” he
said.

They sank down on a soft bed of grass and
explored together the wonder of their newly
discovered bodies. They found a shared joy they had
not dreamed of before, and they blessed the golden
fruit that had awakened their sleeping senses.

T ogether, in the early twilight, they walked
down the mountainside to their shelter. Her
arm was around his waist, while he encir-
cled her shoulder with his arm and drew her head
against him. They walked in silence, slowly.

At the foot of the mountain they stopped. A
light flickered and flared bright under the darken-

•3

in a short time. He stopped, but she walked on, into
the center of the clearing, where the bright bush
stood alone, and picked two of the thumb-sized
golden fruits. He cried out and rushed forward as
she placed one in her mouth and bit down, but he
was too late to stop her.

“Why did you do this? Remember the warning
—if we eat this fruit, we die!” he said.

“I’ve eaten it before this, and I’m not dead.
Try it,” she said, extending the golden fruit to him.

“No. I can’t.”

“We were told, ‘Eat this fruit and you die.’
I’ve eaten it, and yet I live. Try it. Please.”

“And if we die?”

"“At least we die together. Would you rather
live on here without me?”

That was a thought he could not bear.
Without a word, he took the fruit from her fingers
and placed it in his mouth. It burst at the pressure
of his tongue, and rich sweet juice flooded his
mouth with a savor unlike anything he had ever
tasted before. He gave a little involuntary moan of
delight at the sensation, and, without thinking,
reached out to pluck one, two, then a handful more
of the golden fruit, and the woman beside him
laughed and did the same.

He turned to her, and another new sensation

Final Version

ing sky and came to rest before them. He stepped
forward in a protective stance as the light dimmed
and took the form of one of the guardians of the
place.

“What do you want here?” the man said.

The guardian’s voice was like the rolling of
great boulders down the mountainside. The rush of
air from its pinions swept the fallen leaves past the
man and blew the hair back from his face.

“You have broken the law,” the guardian

said.

The man was afraid. He wanted to fall back
before that awesome figure.. But he thought of the
woman, and the punishment that might befall them,
and anger rose in him stronger than the fear.

“What we have done is not your concern. Get
out of our way,” he said.

“Do you defy me?” the guardian roared,
lowering a hand to the sword at its side.

“It is you who defy nje, by intruding on the
place that was given to me. Leave us,” the man
ordered, taking a step forward.

The guardian drew its sword. The man
stooped, lifted a heavy stone from the ground, and
hurled it with all his strength. It struck the guard-
ian full in the chest, staggering it. The sword
whirled free, glinting in the dying light. The woman
sprang to snatch up the fallen blade.

“Now leave,” she said to the stricken guard-
ian. “And never intrude on us again.”

The guardian hesitated, and seemed about to
speak, but the man stepped forward and the woman
brandished the sword, and the guardian faded
away. The woman came to his side and put her
arms around him. “You were brave,” she said.

“Until now, I feared them.”

“But no more.”

“No, no more.” He looked down at her,
bemused. “Before I even raised my hand against
the creature, I knew it was beaten.”

“Do I make you so strong?”

“You’ve shown me why I must be strong.”

He took the sword from her. Hand in hand,
more watchful now, they descended the remainder
of the way.

As they reached their shelter, the skies
darkened. A wind rose, and its first faint whisper
grew in an instant to a roar. Sudden drops of rain
Struck like flung pellets against their naked flesh. A
peal of thunder shook the ground under their feet,
and in a flash of lightning that seared the trees
around them, their Creator appeared, His blazing
face drawn into lines of wrath.

“What have you done?” He said in a voice
that overbore the thunder.

The man stood fast before Him, the sword in
his hand. “I drove out an intruder,” he said.

“You have done more.”

“Accuse me, then.”

Thunder roared all around, and lightning
lanced the ground at his very feet, but the man
stood firm. At last came the accusation. “You have
eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
This was forbidden you, and yet you did it. Now
you face My punishment.”

“Why should I be punished?”

“Do you deny eating the golden fruit?” the
voice of the Creator thundered.

“I deny doing wrong. You gave me this place,
and told me I was master here. Why should
anything be forbidden to me where I am master?”

“Do you feel no guilt? No shame?”

“I do not!” the man said, and took a step for-
ward. “I will enjoy the fruits of my own garden as I
choose. Send guardians to threaten me, and I’ll
treat them as I treated the first one.”

“Would you attack Me, then?”

The man let the sword fall from his hand.
“No, not You. Never You. I only defend what You
gave me for my own.”

The Creator raised His hand and pointed at
the man, who steeled himself for a blast that did
not come. Instead, in a solemn voice, like retreating
thunder, the Creator said, “You have broken My
law and struck down My servant, and you show no
remorse. Will you kneel before Me and beg
forgiveness?”

“No. I have done no wrong.”

“I can destroy you.”

“Then destroy me, and make a creature that
will crawl before You,” the man said.

“And a new companion for him,” said the
woman. She came to the man’s side and placed her
hand tight in his.

woman awaited their doom.

“At last!” the Creator cried into the silence. I
“At last!” He cried again, and the darkness lifted.
A joyous light shone forth from His countenance
and illumined all around the man and woman and
embraced them. “Over and over, on worlds beyond
numbering, I have created you. On every world I ;
put you to a test. And of all who take the test, none
has yet had the courage to accept the consequences.
Eat the fruit, and you can become as I. They could
not bear this. When I faced them, they crawled,
before Me, and cringed, and whimpered for mercy.

I demanded guilt and shame, and they gave it to
Me, and they live in thrall to it forever. But you
gave Me courage.”

He stepped closer, and held out His arms.
They came to Him, and He enfolded them in light
and pressed them to Him. “On a million million
worlds I have slaves and worshipers,” He said soft-
ly. “But here, at last, I have My children.” tS

Photos courtesy Serling Archives, Ithaca College of Communications

S H O W - B Y - S H O W G U I D E

TV’s Twilight Zone:
Part Ten

CONTINUING MARC SCOTT ZICREE’S
SHOW-BY-SHOW GUIDE TO THE ENTIRE
TWILIGHT ZONE TELEVISION SERIES,
COMPLETE WITH ROD SERLING’S OPENING
AND CLOSING NARRATIONS

“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is
known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space
and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle
ground between light and shadov), between science
and superstition, and it lies between the pit of
man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This
is the dimension of imagination. It is an area
which we call the Twilight Zone.”

87. A PIANO IN THE HOUSE

Written by Earl Hamner, Jr.
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: David Greene
Dir. of Photography:

George T. Clemens
Music: Stock
Cast

Fitzgerald Fortune: Barry Morse
Esther Fortune: Joan Hackett
Marge Moore: Muriel Landers
Marvin the Butler: Cyril Delevanti
Gregory Walker: Don Durant
Throckmorton: Phil Coolidge

“Mr. Fitzgerald Fortune, theater
critic and cynic-at-large, on his way
to a birthday party, if he knew what
is in store for him, he probably
wouldn’t go. Because before this
evening is over, that cranky
old piano is going to play those
piano roll blues, with some effects
that could happen only in the
Twilight Zone.”

Fortune buys his wife a player
piano for her birthday, then
discovers it has magical properties
—its music- reveals people’s hidden
faces. A hard-hearted curio shop
owner gushes with sentimentality; a
solemn butler bursts out with gales
of laughter. Using it on his wife,
Fortune discovers that she actually
detests him. Fortune decides that
the piano is the ideal tool to
humiliate his wife’s party guests.
Under the music’s spell, a seemingly
jaded playwright admits to being
passionately in love with Fortune’s
wife. A boisterous fat woman

reveals fantasies of being a delicate, j
graceful little girl and a beloved,
beautiful snowflake. Delighted with
his cruel game, Fortune hands his
wife another roll to put on the
piano, but she switches to a
different piece, one that bewitches
Fortune and strips him of his
facade. In truth, he is no more than
a frightened sacistic child. Disgusted
and embarrassed, the guests depart
—along with Fortune’s wife.

“Mr. Fitzgerald Fortune, a man
who went searching for concealed
persons and found, himself— in the
Twilight Zone.”

Marc Scott Zicree

88. TO SERVE MAN

Written by Rod Serling

Based on the story by Damon Knight

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Richard L. Bare

Dir. of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: Stock

Cast

Chambers: Lloyd Bochner
Kanamit: Richard Kiel
Pat: Susan Cummings
Citizen Gregori: Theodore Marcuse
With Will J. White, Gene Benton,
Bartlett Robinson, Carlton Young,
Hardie Albright, Robert Tafur,

Lomax Study, Nelson Olmstead,
Charles Tannen, James L. Wellman,
Adrienne Marden, and Jeanne Evans

89. THE LAST RITES OF JEFF

MYRTLEBANK

Written and directed
by Montgomery Pittman
Producer: Buck Houghton
Dir. of Photography: Jack Swain
Music: Tommy Morgan
Cast

Jeff Myrtlebank: James Best
Comfort Gatewood: Sherry Jackson
Orgram Gatewood: Lance Fuller
i Mr. Peters: Dub Taylor
Pa Myrtlebank: Ralph Moody
Ma Myrtlebank: Ezelle iPouley
Ma Gatewood: Helen Wallace
. With Vickie Barnes, Bill Fawcett,
Edgar Buchanan, Mabel Forrest, Jon
Lormer, Pat Hector, and Jim
Houghton

“ Respectfully submitted for your
perusal— a Kanamit. Height: a little
over nine feet. Weight: in the
neighborhood of three hundred fifty
pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives?
Therein hangs the tale, for in just a
moment we’re going to ask you to
shake hands, figuratively, with a
Christopher Columbus from another
galaxy and another time. This is the
Twilight Zone. ”

The Kanamits arrive on Earth with
seemingly one purpose in mind: to aid
mankind in every possible way by
using their superior technology. They
end famine, supply a cheap power
source, and provide defensive force
fields. Armies become obsolete.
Although some distrust them, the
Kanamits appear totally altruistic, a
fact supported by a Kanamit book
left at the U.N. Once translated, the
title reads “To Serve Man.”
Thousands book passage to the

“Time, the mid-Twenties. Place, the
Midwest— the southernmost section of
the Midwest. We were just witnessing
a funeral, a funeral that didn’t come
off exactly as planned, due to a slight
fallout— from the Twilight Zone. ”

During his funeral, Jeff Myrtlebank
abruptly sits up in the coffin, alive
and well. Jeff claims to be the same
as always, but as time goes by, others
have doubts. Jeff is exhibiting new
traits: a love of hard work, skill at
fisticuffs, and the ability to make
freshly picked flowers wilt in his
grasp. After Jeff bests Orgam
Gatewood, the brother of his fiancee
Comfort, in a fight, a group of
townspeople come to the conclusion
that Jeff is actually an evil spirit.

They decide to run him out of the
county. Although previously
frightened of Jeff, Comfort rushes
off to warn him. Jeff demands that
Comfort decide whether she’ll stick
by him. As the men arrive, Comfort
agrees to marry him. Jeff tells the
men that he and his wife-ta-be intend

Kanamits’ home planet, including
Michael Chambers, a U.S. decoding
expert. Meanwhile, however, his
assistant Pat is trying to translate
the Kanamit book’s text. As
Chambers prepares to board ship, Pat
frantically rushes up. She’s succeeded
in her attempts— “To Serve Man” is
a cookbook! Chambers tries to
escape, but a Kanamit forces him into
the ship, which then blasts off.
Helplessly, Chambers finds himself
bound for another planet— and some
alien’s dinner table! .

“The recollections of one Michael
Chambers, with appropriate
flashbacks and soliloquy. Or more
simply stated, the evolution of man,
the cycle of going from dust to
dessert, the metamorphosis from
being the ruler of a planet to an
ingredient in someone’s soup. It’s
tonight’s bill of fare on the Twilight
Zone. ”

to stay. If he is Jeff Myrtlebank they
have nothing to worry about; but if
he’s a supernatural being, then
they’d better treat him and his
family well— for with his magic he
can cause them no end of distress.
Feigning reassurance but actually
terrified, the townfolk depart. Jeff
explains to Comfort that he lied to
them; he’s as human as she is. But
while he says this, he lights a
match— without striking it!

“Jeff and Comfort are still alive
today, and their only son is a
United States senator who’s noted as
an uncommonly shrewd politician—
and some believe he must have gotten
his education in the Twilight Zone. ”

“It’s been said that science fiction and
fantasy are two different things:
science fiction, the improbable made
possible; fantasy, the impossible made
probable. What would you have if you
put these two different things
together? Well, you’d have an old man
named Ben, who knows a lot of tricks
most people don’t know, and a little
girl named Jenny who loves him, and
a journey— into the heart of the
Twilight Zone. ”

Two men are looking for Old Ben, a
mysterious figure who can change
into anything from mouse to fly to
hideous monster from outer space.
Ben tells Jenny, who lives with her
aunt and wears a leg brace, that he is
a fugitive from outer space; the men
are his pursuers. Before fleeing, Ben
uses a device to fix Jenny’s leg. The
two men arrive and use a similar
device to make Jenny deathly ill. The
trap works; Ben is forced to return
and heal Jenny. The truth then
becomes clear: Ben is not a fugitive

from justice, but the beloved
monarch of an alien planet. The two
men are subjects sent to plead with
him to return to the throne.
Reluctantly, Ben agrees to go with
them, but the men refuse to let
Jenny come along. Suddenly, Jenny
has an idea. Ben is allowed a
minute alone with her. When the
men return, thej find two Jennys!
Afraid to take the wrong one, they
are forced to take both.

90. THE FUGITIVE

Written by Charles Beaumont
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Richard L. Bare
Dir. of Photography: Jack Swain
Music: Stock
Cast

Old Ben: J. Pat O’Malley
Jenny: Susan Gordon
Mrs. Gann: Nancy Kulp
Man ttl: Wesley Lau
Man #2: Paul Tripp
Howie: Stephen Talbot
Pitcher: Johnny Eiman
Doctor: Russ Bender

“Mrs. Gann will be in for a big
surprise when she finds this [photo
of a handsome young man] under
Jenny’s pillow, because Mrs. Gann
has more temper than imagination.
She’ll never dream that this is a
picture of Old Ben as he really
looks, and it will never occur to her
that eventually her niece will grow
up to be an honest-to-goodness
queen— somewhere in the Twilight
Zone.”

“Missing: one frightened little girl.
Name: Betina Miller. Description: six
years of age, average height and build,
light brown hair, quite pretty. Last
seen being tucked into bed by her
mother a few hours ago. Last heard—
aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet put it.
For Betina Miller can be heard quite
clearly, despite the rather curious fact
that she can’t be seen at all. Present
location? Let’s say for the moment—
in the Twilight Zone. ”

sights and sounds. He calls the dog,
who brings Tina to him. Chris grabs
hold of both Tina and the dog, and
Bill pulls the three of them out.

And none too soon— the hole has
closed; the wall is solid. “Another
few seconds,” Bill tells Chris, “and
half of you would have been here
and the other half ...”

91. LITTLE GIRL LOST

Written by Richard Matheson

Based on his short story

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Paul Stewart

Dir. of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: Bernard Herrmann

Cast

Bill: Charles Aidman
Chris Miller: Robert Sampson
Ruth Miller: Sarah Marshall
Tina: Tracy Stratford
Tina’s Voice: Rhoda Williams

“The other half where? The fourth
dimension? The fifth? Perhaps. They
never found the answer. Despite a
battery of research physicists
equipped with every device known to
man, electronic and otherwise, 'no
result was ever achieved, except
perhaps a little more respect for and
uncertainty about the mechanisms of
the Twilight Zone. ”

When his daughter Tina rolls
underneath her bed and disappears,
Chris Miller summons the aid of his
friend Bill, a physicist, Soon
thereafter, the family dog bolts
under the bed and disappears, too.
Bill suspects Tina has fallen through
a hole into another dimension, a
theory borne out when he puts his
hand through a seemingly solid wall.
Chris reaches his arm through in an
attempt to grab Tina. Inadvertently
he pitches forward, falling halfway
through the hole— and finds himself
in a world of bizarrely, distorted

92. PERSON OR PERSONS
UNKNOWN

1 Written by Charles Beaumont
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: John Brahm
Dir. of Photography: Rol)ert W. Pittack
Music: Stock
! Cast

David Gurney: Richard Long
Dr. Koslenko: Frank Sii vera
; Wilma #1: Shirley Ballard
Wilma #2: Jukie Van Zandt
Woman Clerk: Betty Harford
Mr. Hurtubise: Ed Glover
Policeman: Michael Keep
Bank Guard: Joe Higgins
Mr. Cooper: John Newton

93. THE GIFT

; Written by Rod Serling
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Allen H. Miner
Dir. of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Laurindo Almeida
: Cast

Williams: Geoffrey Horne
Doctor: Nico Minardos
j Pedro: Edmund Vargas
Manuelo: Cliff Osmond
Officer: Paul Mazursky
Guitarist: Vladimir Sokoloff
Rudolpho: Vito Scotti
Sanchez: Henry Corden
i With Carmen D’ Antonio, Lea
Marmer, Joe Perry, and David
I Fresco

“Cameo of a man who has just lost
his most valuable possession. He
doesn’t know about the loss yet. In
fact, he doesn’t even know about the
possession. Because, like most people,
David Gurney has never really
thought about the matter of his
identity. But he’s going to be
thinking about it a great deal from
now on, because that is what he’s
lost. And his search for it is going
to take him into the darkest comers
of the Twilight Zone. ”

David Gurney wakes up to find that
no one— nothis wife, his fellow
workers, his best friend, even his
own mother— knows him. All
evidence of his identify has
inexplicably disappeared. He’s
committed to an asylum, but
manages to escape and find a
photograph of himself and his wife,
proving that she must know him.
But when the police arrive with a
psychiatrist, the picture has changed
and shows Gurney alone. He throws

“The place is Mexico, just across the
Texas border, a mountain village
held back in time by its remoteness
and suddenly intruded upon by the
twentieth century. And this is Pedro,
nine years old, a lonely, rootless
little boy, who will soon make the
acquaintance of a traveler from a
distant place. We are at present
forty miles from the Rio Grande, but
any place and all places can be the
Twilight Zone. ”

After crash-landing outside the
village, a human-looking alien
accidentally kills a police officer, but
another officer manages to wound
him. He stumbles into a village bar
where he collapses. A sympathetic
doctor removes two bullets from his
chest. While recuperating, the alien
—who calls himself “Mr. Williams”
—is befriended by Pedro, a somber
orphan who sweeps up the bar.
Williams gives Pedro a gift, which
he says he will explain later.
Meanwhile, the bartender has
notified the army as to the alien’s

himself on the ground— and wakes
up in bed. It was all a bad dream.
His wife gets out of bed and talks
to him from the bathroom as she
removes cream from her face. But
when she emerges, Gurney is
horrified to see that, although she
talks and acts the same as always,
she doesn’t look anything at all like
the wife he knows!

“A case of mistaken identity or a
nightmare turned inside out? A
simple loss of memory or the end of
the world? David Gurney may never
find the answer, but you can be sure
he’s looking for it— in the Twilight
Zone. ”

whereabouts. Williams tries to
escape, but is cornered by soldiers
and villagers. He tells Pedro to
show them the gift, but it is
snatched from him and set afire.
The soldiers shoot Williams and kill
him. The doctor takes the remnant
of the gift from the fire. It reads,
“Greetings to the people of Earth.
We come in peace. We bring you
this gift. The following chemical
formula is a vaccine against all
forms of cancer.” The rest is
burned away.

“Madeira, Mexico, the present. The
subject: fear. The cure: a little more
faith. An Rx off a shelf— in the
Twilight Zone. ’’ (3

The Night of the Meek

by Rod Serling

THE ORIGINAL
TELEVISION SCRIPT
FIRST AIRED ON CBS-TV
DECEMBER 23, 1960

CAST

Henry Corwin . . Art Carney

Mr. Dundee John Fiedler

Old Man . . .Burt Mustin

Officer Flaherty Robert Lieb

Sister Florence Meg Wyllie

Bartender Val Avery

Elf - Larrian Gillespie

Fat Woman Kay Cousins

FADE ON

1. STANDARD ROAD
OPENING

With vehicle smashing into
letters, propulsion into starry
night then PAN DOWN TO

I OPENING SHOT OF PLAY.

2. INT. DEP ARTMENT
STORE DAY
FULL SHOT OF A
ROPED-OFF AREA

Attended by a line of restless
kids and haggard, harried
mothers. A large sign on a
| .poster nearby proclaim^ that

Photos courtesy Serling Archives, Ithaca College School of Communications

there is, “One Shopping Day
Till Christmas.”

3. PAN DOWN T:SE LINE
OF MOTHERS AND KIDS

Until we reach another sign
hung on a velvet tassled rope
that surrounds a large
platform. This will tell us that
“Santa Claus will return at 6
o’clock.” Another PAN UP the
wall to a clock which reads,
“6:30.” Another PAN DOWN
for shot of Mr. Dundee, floor
manager and potentate of all
things Yule-like. He studies
his wristwatch with an
upraised eyebrow e.nd ill-
concealed impatience. He
checks this with the clock on
the wall. Then his eyes travel
over to the empty Santa Claus
chair.

4. MED. CLOSE SHOT
EMPTY SANTA CLAUS
CHAIR

DISSOLVE TO:

5. INT. BAR MED.

CLOSE SHOT
CLOCK ON WA LL

Which reads: “6:30.” PAN
DOWN to a large mirror
behind the bar and the
reflection of Henry Corwin
sitting alone in a booth.
CAMERA PANS’ OVER FOR A
MED. CLOSE SHOT of Corwin,
who sits there embarking on
what is obviously a fifth or
sixth drink. He’s dressed in
an ill-fitting, moth-eaten Santa
Claus outfit, the false
whiskers, hanging several
inches from his chin; the
Santa Claus hat is a few
degrees awry on his head, but
with it all, the face could very
well be that of Santa Claus.
There’s something gentle,
kind, and infinitely patient
and warm that is a part of
the features. The bartender
comes into the frame
alongside the table.
BARTENDER
(Points to clock)

You told me -to tell yuh

when it was six-thirty. It’s
six-thirty.

CORWIN •

(Nods)

That’s exactly what it is.
Six-thirty. So?

BARTENDER
(Very bored).

So what happens now? You
turn into a reindeer?
CORWIN

(With a slight smile)

Would that that were so!

(He holds up his empty glass)
One more, huh?

BARTENDER

(Pouring from bottle he’s

holding)

- That’s six drinks and a
sandwich. You owe me four-
eighty, Santa.

(Corwin takes out a single bill
from his .pocket, hands it to
the bartender.)

6. A DIFFERENT ANGLE
CORWIN

As seen from the other side of
the table. He lifts the glass to
his lips and then is suddenly
conscious of someone staring
at him. He turns and looks
across the bar.

7. LONG SHOT ACROSS
THE BAR CORWIN’S
P.O.V.

The front window. Two little
urchins, a boy and a girl
under ten, are staring at him
through the glass, their noses
pressed against it.

8. DIFFERENT ANGLE
CORWIN

As he swallows, looks
discomfited, then turns so
that his back is partially to
them. Then he down the
drink in a hurry, puts it
down. He rises to his feet,
looks across at the two little
kids who, seeing that he’s
noticing them, take off into
the night and disappear. He
turns to the bartender.
CORWIN
(Thoughtfully)

Why do you suppose there
isn’t really a Santa Claus?

9. CLOSE SHOT
BARTENDER

Who’s returned to the bar,
looks up surprised from
\ drying glasses.

BARTENDER
How’s that?

10. TWO SHOT CORWIN
AND BARTENDER

CORWIN

Why isn’t there a real Santa
Claus?

(He nods toward the window.)

For kids like that?
BARTENDER
(With a shrug)

What am I - a philosopher?
You know what your
trouble is, Corwin?

(He reaches over and touches
Corwin’s red suit.)

You let that stupid red suit
go to your head! Here’s
your change.

(He puts down two dimes
on the counter. Corwin ’
look^ down at them, cocks
his head, looks up with a
sad attempt at roguishness.)
CORWIN

I’ll flip you double or
nothing.

BARTENDER
What do you think this
is -Las Vegas? Come on, eat
your sandwich and get out
of here.

CORWIN

I’ve had enough -to eat.

11. TRACK SHOT CORWIN

As he rises and walks slowly
toward the door, reaches it,
opens it up, stares out
through the half-open door to
the snow that falls outside.
Then he turns, is about to say
something to the bartender.

12. LONG SHOT
* BARTENDER

He’s busy drying glasses. His
back is to Corwin.

13. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As his eyes move over to the
cash register.

The Night of the Meek

14. CLOSE SHOT HIS FIVE-
DOLLAR BILL

Sitting on top of the keys.

15. DIFFERENT ANGLE
CORWIN

As he walks stealthily back to
the cash register, reaches
with his hand over the
counter toward it.

16. EXTREMELY TIGHT
CLOSE SHOT HIS
FINGERS

About to grab the bill when
suddenly into the frame
comes the bartender’s hand,
smacking Corwin’s hand with
a resounding slap.

17. TWO SHOT THE T'VJO
OF THEM

As Corwin retrieves his
injured fingers and puts them
in his mouth.

BARTENDER
Santa Claus, I catch you
doing that one more
time -I’m gonna break both
your arms up to the
shoulder blades. Now go on,
get out of here.

(in phone)

Naw, just Santa Claus
trying to hoist the joint.

18. DIFFERENT ANGLE
CORWIN '

Picks up two dimes, throws
one at bartender.

CORWIN
Thanks, Bruce.

(As he slowly walks toward
the door and then outside.)

19. EXT. STREET

As Henry Corwin pulls the
top buttons of his thin jacket
together, shivers with the cold
night winter wind and the
wet, freezing snowflakes that
drive at him. He walks over
to the curb, leans briefly
against the lamp post, looks
up, and blinks his eyes as the
snow falls in his face, then
very slowly and half-
stumbling, he starts to walk

away and is suddenly gripped
by the after-effects of the
liquor. He reaches out to
steady himself and winds up
dropping to a sitting position
on the curb where he sits
there, bent over, his head
down.

20. MED. CLOSE SHOT
CORWIN AT THE CURB

He is suddenly conscious of
other presence. He looks up
very slowly, PAN SHOT UP
THE STREET and legs of the
two little street urchins who
stand there, hand in hand.
LITTLE GIRL
Santa Claus ... I want a
carriage ... I want a dolly
. . . and a playhouse . . .
and a job for my daddy.
LITTLE BOY

And, Santa Claus, I want a
gun . . . and a set of
soldiers . . . and a fort . . . .
and a big turkey for our
Christmas dinner.

21. REVERSE ANGLE
LOOKING TOWARD
CORWIN THE
CHILDREN’S P.O.V.

Tears course down his face.

He stumbles to land on his
knees, then flings his arms
around both of them, burying
his face against their coats
and crying, dry, harsh sobs.

22. REVERSE ANGLE
LOOKING TOWARD
CHILDREN

His face is buried against the
children. We now hear
Serling’s voice in narration.
SERLING’S VOICE
This is Mr. Henry Corwin,
normally unemployed, who
once a year takes the lead
role in the uniquely
American institution - that
of the department store
Santa Claus in a road-
company version of “The
■ Night Before Christmas.”
(Now the CAMERA PANS
OVER to where Serling stands
in front of the bar.)

SERLING

But in just a moment, Mr.
Henry Corwin, ersatz Santa
Claus, will enter a strange
kind of North Pole which .is
one part the wondrous
spirit of Christmas . . . and
one part the magic that can
only be found ... in The
Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK:

OPENING BILLBOARD
FIRST COMMERCIAL

FADE ON:

23. INT. DEPARTMENT
STORE NIGHT
MED. LONG SHOT

Down an aisle leading to the
empty Santa Claus chair.
Corwin comes into the frame
and hurriedly, though
unsteadily, walks toward the
chair.

24. MED. CLOSE SHOT
DUNDEE

Who steps out into the aisle,
deftly, and somewhat
nonchalantly grabs Corwin’s
arm as he passes, stopping
him dead and whirling him
about.

DUNDEE

(through clenched teeth)
Corwin, you’re an hour late!
CORWIN
I am?

DUNDEE

■ Now get up on your throne
and see if you can keep
from disillusioning a lot of
kids that not only isn’t
there a Santa Claus -but the
one in this store happens to
be a wino who’d be more at
home playing Rudolph the
red- nosed reindeer! Now get
with it . . .

(and then he spits this out
like an epithet)

Santa Claus!

WOMAN

(In a screechy voice)

You go ahead. Climb up on
his lap. He won’t hurt you,
will you, Santa Claus? You
won’t hurt my little 'boy.

You go ahead, -you tell
him -

(She gives the kid a massive
boot and he winds up at the
foot of Corwin, who rises,
weaves unsteadily, extends a
wavering hand, 'hiccoughs.)
CORWIN

What’s your name, little
boy?

BOY

Pereival Smithere.

CORWIN

Oh. What would you like for
Christmas, Pereival?

BOY

A new front name-.

25. MED. CLOSE SHOT
CORWIN

As he tilts sideways, grabs
the chair for support, and
then winds up sitting on the
floor where he smiles up
apologetically at the little boy.

26. CLOSE SHOT
LITTLE BOY

As he turns to his mother,
jerking his thumb in Corwin’s
direction.

PERCIVAL

Hey, Mai Santa Claus is
loaded!

27. MED. CLOSE SHOT
WOMAN

As she rips the rope aside,
barges into the area, grabs
her kid by the hand, and
looks down, infuriated, at
Corwin.

WOMAN

You’ve got some nerve! You
ought to be ashamed!

28. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As he rises unsteadily to his
feet and with a thin, sad
smile -
CORWIN

Madam, I am ashamed.

29. TWO SHOT

WOMAN

(yanking her son)

Come along, Pereival. I hope
this isn’t, going to be a
traumatic experience for
you!

(Then over her shoulder

toward Corwin, she spits this
out)

Sot I

At this moment, people
overhearing the loud tone
have stopped and are staring
at the woman and then at
Corwin. Dundee, the manager,
comes into the frame,
obviously desperately
frightened by what’s going
on, and his voice takes on the
unctuous placating quality of
every hard-pressed store
manager in the world.
DUNDEE

Is there some trouble here,
madam?

WOMAN

-Trouble? No, there’s no
trouble - except this is the
last time I trade in this
store! It seems you hire
your Santa Clauses out of
a gutter!

30. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

He takes a step over toward
her. .

31. CLOSE SHOT WOMAN

Her face twisted with anger.
WOMAN

Come on, Pereival.

She barges into two people,
pushes them bodily out of the
way, and drags the child
down the aisle.

32. CLOSE SHOT DUNDEE

As he whirls around, icy-
faced, toward Corwin, looks
briefly at the salespeople who
have congregated around.
DUNDEE
(tersely)

All right, back to work.
Back to your positions!

33. TRACK SHOT WITH
HIM

As he walks toward Corwin,
stopping by the velvet rope
that encloses the area, and
then, with fierce expression,
waggles a finger toward
Corwin, who unsteadily walks
over to him.

DUNDEE

And now, Mr. Kris Kringle
of the lower depths . . .
since we are only a few
hours from closing, it is my
distinct pleasure to inform
you that there is no' more
need for your services.
You’ve had it! Now get out
of here!

34. MED. CLOSE SHOT
CORWIN

As with sagging shoulders
and looking less and less like
even a caricature of Santa
Claus, he starts to walk
slowly down the steps. Over

TKcTNight of thelvdeek

his shoulder we see Dundee
staring at him coldly. As he
passes the manager -
CORWIN

It’ll be my pleasure.

DUNDEE
(on platform)

And get that moth-eaten red
suit back to where you
rented It from before you
really tie one on and
destroy it for good and all,
you drunk.

35. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As he stops, looks at the
manager, smiles gently.
CORWIN

(comes back up platform)
Thank you ever so much,

Mr. Dundee! As to my
drinking - this is •

indefensible and you have
my abject apologies. I find
of late that I have very little
choice in the matter of
expressing emotions. I can
either drink or I can ...
weep. And drinking is so
much more subtle.

DUNDEE

Will you please leave.

CORWIN " '

But as for my
insubordination —

(He shakes his head)

I was not rude to that
woman! Someone should
■ remind her that Christmas'
isn’t just barging up and
down department store
aisles and pushing people
out of the way.

DUNDEE

Corwin!

CORWIN

Someone should tell her
that -Christmas is something
quite different than that.

It’s richer and finer and
truer and . . . and it should
come with patience and love
and charity and compassion -
(He looks away, -his voice very
soft)

That’s what I would have
told her . . . had she given
me the chance!

36. CLOSE SHOT DUNDEE

DUNDEE

(Icily)

How philosophical, Mr.
Corwin! Perhaps as your
parting words you can tell
us how we go about living
up to these wondrous Yule
standards which you so
graciously laid down for us?

37. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

He looks up and there’s no

Smile now.

CORWIN

(Softly, shaking his head)

I don’t know how to tell
you.

{Turns)

I don’t know how to tell at
all. All I know is that I’m
an aging, purposeless relic
of another time and I live
in a dirty rooming house on
a street that’s filled with
hungry kids and shabby
people, where the only thing
to come down the chimney
on Christmas Eve is more
poverty.

DUNDEE

Keep your voice down.

CORWIN

As you know, another
reason I drink - so that *
when I walk down the
tenements, I can really
think that they’re the North
Pole and the children are
elves and that I’m really
Santa Claus bringing a bag
of wondrous things for all
of them.

(He looks down to the floor.)

I wish, Mr. Dundee ... on
just one Christmas . . . only
one . . . that I could see
some of . . . the hopeless
ones and the dreamless
ones . . .

(he looks up)

Just on one Christmas . . .
I’d like to see the meek
inherit the earth!

(He nods slowly)

That’s why I drink, Mr.
Dundee, and that’s why I
weep.

He takes a deep breath,
smiles, turns, and shuffles
away down the aisle, watched
by fascinated salespeople and
customers, who whisper
among themselves about the
strange little man with the
odd way of speaking and the
extremely odd things that he
says.

DISSOLVE TO:

38. EXT. STREET NIGHT

Snow cascades down in
driving sheets of wet white.

39. TRACK SHOT CORWIN

As he walks toward the
camera and then suddenly
stops. The sound of the wind
has also stopped, and there’s
a sudden and utter silence.
Over this, wb hear the sound
of sleigh bells. Corwin tilts
his head, looking up toward
the sky and tnen around. The
sound of the sleigh bells
persists. Corwin looks off,
puzzled, then starts to walk
again. When he does so, the
wind comes up and it’s
almost as if he were satisfied
that, for a moment, he was
suffering either an illusion or
had not yet completely
sobered up.

40. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As once again he stops and
again the wind has stopped
and this time the sleigh bells
are persistent and much
louder.

41. LONG SHOT CORWIN

As he starts to step in front
of the entrance to an alley. At
this moment, there’s the
sound of a shrieking,
caterwauling eat.

42. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As he turns to stare toward
the alley ._

43. CLOSE SHOT A ROW
OF GARBAGE CANS

And a cat that suddenly leaps
off of them and disappears
into the darkness. In the

process, it tips over a big
burlap bag.

44. CLOST SHOT THE BAG

As it lands on the ground.

The top seam splits, and a
couple of old empty cans roll
out.

45. DIFFERENT ANGLE
CORWIN

As he walks over, retrieves a
few with his hands, shoves
them back inside the bag,
then starts to hoist the bag
on top of the garbage cans
again. It tips, starts to fall
again, and Corwin starts to
carry it over toward the end
of the cans, lugging it over
his shoulder much as the real
Kris Kringle might, do in his
nocturnal deliveries.

46. ANGLE SHOT
LOOKING DOWN AT
CORWIN

As he carries the burlap bag.

47. TOP HAT SHOT WAIST-
HIGH LOOKING
TOWARD CORWIN

As he approaches the camera
from the other end of the
garbage cans. He suddenly
stops in his tracks as once
again all sounds stop and he
looks up, wide-eyed, as again
he hears the sound of sleigh
bells and this time, tiny hoof
beats as if from a group of
animals. He very slowly lets
the burlap bag drop from his
shoulder, where it tips again
and falls forward.

48. EXTREMELY TIGHT
CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As his eyes slowly look •
toward the ground. He reacts.

49. CLOSE SHOT
THE GROUND

Where the burlap bag lies on
its 3ide, its top open. But
protruding out of Its open end
is a toy truck, a doll, and
evidence of many other brand-
I new, shiny toys. Corwin
makes an exclamation of
amazement that is mixed with
a cry of joy.

50. TOP HAT CLOSE SHOT
OF CORWIN

Down on his knees, as he
starts to thrust the toys back
into the bag, then lifts the
bag to his shoulder.

51. CAMERA FOLLOWS HIM
SHOOTING A LONG
ANGLE SHOT DOWN ON
HIM

As he races down the alley
toward the street, occasionally
stopping to pick up toys that
have fallen, and shouting at
the top of his lungs.

CORWIN

Hey . . . hey, everybody . . .
Hey, kids . . . Merry
Christmas, kids . . . Hey kids
. . . Merry Christmas . . .

FADE TO BLACK:

ACT TWO

FADE IN:

52. INT. MISSION HOUSE
NIGHT

This is a big, square, bench-
laden room with posters on
the wall with little homilies
like, “Love thy Neighbor,”

“Do Unto Others As You
Would Have Them Do Unto
You,” “Faith, Hope, and
Charity,” etc., etc. And then a
large sign at the far end of
the room which reads, “The
Delancey Street Mission
House.” PAN DOWN from this
sign for a shot of an angular,
spinsterish-looking woman
who pounds on an organ an
obscure Christmas carol
which is more spirited than
melodic.

53. DIFFERENT
ANGLE THE ROOM

PAN SHOT up and down the
row of benches for shots of
shabby old men, perhaps
twelve of them, who sit there
listening to the music, a
couple of them drinking coffee
out of cheap china mugs,
holding their cups more to
warm their hands than their
insides. Each of them wears
the face of despair that can
only come with poverty and
age going hand in hand.

54. LONG SHOT THE
ROOM

Down the center aisle as the
door at the far end opens,
and an old man hurriedly
I comes in. We see him whisper
' something to another old man
on a bench, who in turn leans
over to his partner on the
other side and also whispers
something.

55. CLOSE SHOT THE
WOMAN PLAYING THE
ORGAN

Who continues to pound, and
then, as the voices start to
intrude on the “music,” she
plays louder to drown the
voices out.

56. DIFFERENT ANGLE
THE ROOM

As by this time all the old
men have heard something
and are reacting, some
standing on their feet, others
talking loudly.

57. CLOSE SHOT SISTER
FLORENCE

Who suddenly pounds on the
I organ and rises.

SISTER FLORENCE
What is this all about?

What’s all this noise?

What’s this commotion?
What’s the idea of coming
| ? in and disrupting the
Christmas Eve music
service?

58. CLOSE SHOT OLD MAN

| Who had originally brought in
i the message.

The Night of the Meek

OLD MAN

Sister Florence, I ain’t
touched a drop since last
Thursday and that’s the
gospel truth! But I swear to
you right now - on account
of I seen him with my own
eyes -Santa Claus is cornin’
up the street headin’ this
way and he’s giving
everybody his heart’s
desire!

59. TILT CLOSE SHOT
THE OLD MEN

As each reacts in turn.

AD LIBS FROM OLD MEN
“Santa Claus!”

“Who’s kidding who?”

“I don’t believe it.”

60. FLASH SHOT CLOSE

THE DOOR ,

As it bursts open and in
walks Henry Corwin in his
bedraggled Santa Claus suit.
Hung over his shoulder is the
same full bag. At his feet are
a pack of kids, housewives,
and various other denizens of
the area. The voices are loud,
piercing, excited .as we

CUT TO:

61. LONG ANGLE SHOT
CORWIN

As he puts the bag down on
the floor then looks up,
twinkling, making a Santa
Claus gesture of finger to
nosetip.

CORWIN

Merry Christmas,
gentlemen!

(puts bag- down.)

Now what’ll be your
pleasure for Christmas,
gentlemen? How about you?
(He points to the first old
man.)

62. CLOSE SHOT THE OLD
MAN

Whose eyes go wide.

OLD MAN
(Breathlessly)

I fancy a new pipe!

63. FULL SHOT THE AREA

As Corwin reaches into the
bag.

64. CLOSE SHOT THE BAG

As Corwin extracts a beautiful
Meerschaum.

65. MED. GROUP SHOT

As the old man takes the
pipe, shaking his head in
wonderment and an almost
numb delight.

66. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

As he looks around, his eyes
twinkling, and he points to
another old man.

CORWIN
How about you?

67. TWO SHOT

OLD MAN TWO
A woolen sweater?

CORWIN

(Making a triumphant gesture
with his hand.)

A woolen sweater you’ll
have.

(He starts to reach into the
bag then looks up again.)

Size?

OLD MAN TWO
Who cares?

(Corwin reaches back into the
bag and pulls out a beautiful
sweater which the old man
takes with absolute glee.)

68. VARIOUS ANGLES
THE OLD MEN

As they call out their heart’s
desire.

VOICES

“Another sweater, maybe?”
“How about some pipe
tobacco?”

“A carton of cigarettes?”
“Brand new shoes?”
“Smoking jacket?”
“Slippers?”

69. INTERSPERSE THESE
SHOTS WITH CORWIN

Dipping into the bag and
extracting each item in turn
that is called out.

70. CLOSE SHOT
SPINSTERISH-LOOKING
WOMAN, SISTER
FLORENCE

Who pushes her way through
the men and stops.

SISTER FLORENCE
Where’ d ycu get all those
gifts?

71. MED. GROUP SHOT

As Corwin turns toward her.
CORWIN

Sister Florence . . . don’t
ask me to explain. I can’t
explain. I’m as much in the
dark as anybody else. All I
know is that I’ve got a
Santa Claus bag here that
gives everybody just what
they want for Christmds.
And as long as it’s puttin’
out ... I’m puttin’ in.

(He reaches into the bag
again, then looks up, smiling
at her almost, breathlessly.)
How about a new dress,
Sister Florence?

Sister Florence whirls around
on her heel, pushes her way
through the other men and
out the door.

72. WHIP PAN BACK TO
CORWIN

Who has just extracted a
huge, beautifully wrapped
package which a couple of the
old men start to unwrap and
reveal a gorgeous evening
dress. Once again the voices
start with requests for gifts
and the old men crowd
around Corwin as we can see
his arms digging in and
pulling out. Smoking jackets,
pipes, cigarettes, everything
asked for is thrown out into
the air to be grabbed by eager
hands. Then suddenly there’s
the sound of a door slamming
and all voices stop.

73. PAN OVER TO DOOR

Where Sister Florence stands
behind a tall, ruddy-faced
young policeman whose eyes
dart around the room.

74. TRACK SHOT THE
POLICEMAN AS HE
WALKS TOWARD
CORWIN

The old men hurriedly move
to either side in a spasm of
fear. The policeman taps his

billy club on his other palm
as he approaches Corwin.

75. ANGLE SHOT
LOOKING UP TOWARD
POLICEMAN CORWIN’S
P.O.V.

The policeman hovers over
him like a symbol of all the
law and order in the world,
imposing, and at this moment
menacing.

POLICEMAN
(Points toward bag.)

What’s your name?

(Corwin rises, straightening
out his moth-eaten beard.)
CORWIN

Henry Corwin, officer. At
least it was Henry Corwin.
Maybe now it’s Santa Claus
or Kris Kringle. I don’t
know.

76. CLOSE SHOT THE
POLICEMAN

As he sniffs at the air.
POLICEMAN

You drunk, Corwin, is that
it?

77. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

Who laughs again, and his
laugh is so infectious and so
marvelously rich and winning
that the other old men have
to Join.

CUT TO:

78. DIFFERENT ANGLES
THE OLD MEN

Who share the laughter.

79. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

Who laughs again.

CORWIN

(Passing out toys.)

Naturally I’m drunk. I’m
drunk with the -spirit of the
Yulel I’m intoxicated with
the wonder that is
Christmas Eve! I'm
inebriated with Joy and with
delight. Yes, officer, I am
drunk!

80. CLOSE SHOT A
TOOTHLESS OLD MAN

(Who looks around
bewilderedly.)

Ad lib.

81. MED. CLOSE SHOT
POLICEMAN

POLICEMAN

We can settle this one in a
hurry, Corwin.

(Then very meaningfully and
- with -vast suspicion.)

I’d like to see the receipt
for all this stuff.

82. DIFFERENT ANGLE
THE AREA

CORWIN
The receipt?

POLICEMAN
Of course you’ve got a
receipt.

83. CLOSE SHOT THE OLD
MEN AND CORWIN

All of them nod hopefully,
except Corwin, who shakes
his head. The old men look at
one another and their eyes go
down.

84. DIFFERENT ANGLE
POLICEMAN

Who . looks over, toward Sister
Florence.

POLICEMAN

Sister Florence, collect all
the stolen goods and put
them in a pile over there.

I’ll see that they get claimed
after I find out where he
took the stuff from! Come
along, Santa.

(With this he turns and
propels Corwin out the door.)

DISSOLVE TO:

85. INT. POLICE STATION
NIGHT

A small, bare waiting room
flanked by empty benches.

The bag sits on the floor in

the center of the room
presided over by the
policeman, Officer Flaherty,
who nods toward another
policeman a.t the door. The
camera PULLS BACK for a
shot of Mr. Dundee, standing
across the room, who wears a
look of contented ferocity. He
rubs his hands together
briskly, like an executioner,
when Corwin enters the room.
DUNDEE

Aaah . . . here he is! And
here we are!

(Pointing to bag.)

And there that is!

CORWIN

And there you are. How
nice to see you again, Mr.
Dundee.

DUNDEE .

And how nice it will be to
see you, my wistful St.
Nicholas - going up the
river!

(Then turning to Flaherty, his
voice hopeful.)

Do you suppose he could get
as much as ten years?
CORWIN
Ten years?

FLAHERTY

It don’t look good, Corwin!
Of course, they might lop
off a few months if you was
to tell us where the rest of
the loot was.

(Then turning back to
Dundee.)

He’s been givin’ away stuff
for two and a half hours.

He must have a warehouse
full of it. -

(Corwin scratches his head,
looks from one to the other,
then to the bag.)

CORWIN

I’m glad you brought that
up, Officer.

(He points to the bag.)

There’s a little discrepancy
* here.

DUNDEE

Listen, you moth-eaten
Robin Hood -the wholesale
theft of thousand of dollars
worth of goods is not a

The Night of the Meek

simple discrepancy -
(He moves over to the bag and
starts to open it.)

Though I can tell you right
now, Oorwin, that this
whole affair has come as no
surprise to me.

(As he talks he removes
things from the bag -garbage,
broken bottles, etc.)

I perceived that criminal
glint in your eyes the very
moment I saw you! I’m not
a student of human nature
for nothing. I . . .

(Suddenly the cat leaps out
squalling, runs across the
room and out the door. It is
at this moment that Dundee
realizes the nature of the
things he’s removed from the
bag. He stares down at th#
bag then up Corwin as does
Flaherty, both men wide-eyed
and incredulous.)

CORWIN

(He waggles a finger at the
bag.)

Mr. Dundee . . . aah . . .
you have . . . aah . . . kind
of put your finger on the
problem! That bag can’t
seem to make up its mind
whether to give out garbage
or gifts.

FLAHERTY

(His mouth working before
anything comes- out.)

Well it was glvin’ out gifts
when I seen it.

(To Dundee.)

Whatever they wanted -
Corwin was supplyin’. And
it wasn’t tin cans neither! It
was gifts. Toys. All kinds of
things. Expensive stuff. You
might as well admit ft,
Corwin!

CORWIN
(Very happily)

Oh, I admit it!

(Then shaking his head.)

But I believe the essence of
our problem, here is that
we’re dealing. with a most
unusual bag.

FLAHERTY
(Waving him aside.)

My advice to you, Corwin,
is to clean up this mess and
get out of here.

(Corwin shrugs, moves across
the room and starts to put .
the stuff back into the bag.
Dundee turns to Flaherty with
devastating sarcasm.)

DUNDEE

And you, Officer Flaherty,
call yourself a policeman!
Well, I suppose it’s a
demanding task to
distinguish between a bag
full of garbage and an
inventory of expensive
stolen gifts.

FLAHERTY
(Still incredulous)

You can believe me, Mr.
Dundee-. . . it’s just like
Corwin says. We’re dealing
with something
supernatural here.

DUNDEE

(His voice still dripping with
sarcasm.)

In other words, all we need '
do is ask Mr. Corwin to
make a little abracadabra
for us, and no sooner
said -done. Well, go ahead,
Corwin. I fancy a bottle of
cherry brandy, vintage
1903 .

(Then he throws up his hands
in disgust and moves away.)
CORWIN

(Smiles thoughtfully, as he
pauses by the door, the bag
over his shoulder.)

Oh that’s a good year!

That’s a good year.

(He reaches into the bag and
pulls out a gift-wrapped box,
lays it on the bench, looks at
it for a moment, shrugs,
smiles, and then exits.)
DUNDEE

(Turning very slowly.)

And now as to you, Officer
Fla-

(He stops abruptly. His eyes
go wide.)

CORWIN

Merry Christmas,
gentlemen.

(He exits.)

86. WHIP PAN OVER TO
FLAHERTY

Who has opened the package
and holds out a bottle with a
gift tag hanging from it.
Dundee reads from the card.
DUNDEE

“To Mr. Dundee, from
Santa.”

87. CLOSE SHOT THE
BOTTLE

As the cork suddenly pops
right out from it. Flaherty
just sinks back on the bench,
unable to stand any longer.
Dundee, trancelike, walks
over to him, looks at the
bottle and the card, and sinks
to the seat alongside. The two
men stare at the bottle.
Flaherty holds up the bottle.
FLAHERTY
I think you need this.
(Dundee takes the bottle and
takes a swig from it.)

DISSOLVE TO:

88. EXT. STREET NIGHT
FULL SHOT THE AREA
SURROUNDING THE
LAMP POST NEAR THE
BAR

Filtered through the light are
falling snowflakes. PAN
DOWN with the snowflakes
until we reach Henry Corwin
surrounded again by people
as he passes out toys and
gifts from the: bag to the
laughing, excited people who
surround him.

CORWIN

(As he hands the stuff out.)
Merry Christmas . . . Merry
Christmas . . . Merry
Christmas . . . here’s a
sweater for you. What’s
that? A toy?

PAT

I want an electric train
engine.

CORWIN
Diesel or steam?

PAT

I don’t care
ANDREA
.I’d like a dolly.

| CORWIN

Dollies? What color hair
would you like, darlin’?
Blonde, brunette, red, or
what have you?

| (He continues this running
chatter as the voices throw
out the requests at him and
he answers each in turn.
Gradually, the crowd starts to
thin out.)

89. CLOSE SHOT STEEPLE
CLOCK

As it rings twelve find then
the echo of the last chime
starts to fade away. PAN
BACK to group shot of Corwin
and a few people who remain,
each carrying a gift.

90. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

Who looks up and blinks back
happy tears.

CORWIN

And a Merry Christmas to
all!

(He looks down at the bag
again, and for the first time
it’s empty, just a doth sack
that lies crumpled up on the
pavement. He reaches down,
picks it up, stares at it at an
arm’s length, then tosses it
back on the sidewalk.)

91. DIFFERENT CLOSE SHOT
CORWIN

As he smiles down at it, then
I once again in a familiar
gesture, tries to straighten his
beard.

92. CLOSE SHOT OLD MAN

Who touches his arm as
Corwin moves off by him.

OLD MAN

Hey, Santa! Nothin’ for
yourself this Christmas?

93. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

Who touches the old man’s
arm in turn, pats it..

CORWIN

Why, I’ve had the: nicest
Christmas since tire
beginning of time

94. TWO SHOT

OLD MAN

But with nothin’ for
yourself.

(He points to the bag.)

Not a thing.

CORWIN

(Scratches his head.)

Well now do you know
something -
(He shakes his head.)

I can’t think of anything I
want.

OLD MAN

Merry Christmas to you, .
Santa!

(Gets in car.)

Thanks for the car, Santa.
CORWIN

Don’t mention it.

95. TRACK SHOT CORWIN

As he walks down the snow-
covered street.

CUT TO:

(He looks down.)

I think the only thing I’ve
ever wanted was to be the
biggest gift-giver of all
times, and in a way I’ve
had that tonight.

(Then he looks away very
thoughtfully, scratches his
jaw.)

Though if I did have a
choice . . . any choice at all
... of a gift . . .

(He looks toward the old man,
smiling.)

I guess I’d wish I could do
this every year.

(He winks and grins.)

Now that would be a gift,
wouldn’t it!

(A pause, he turns to go, then
stops, turns hack to the old
man.)

God bless you and a Merry
Christmas.

96. DIFFERENT ANGLE
AS HE APPROACHES
CAMERA

He pauses for a moment. His
face has a strange expression,
then he looks around,
realizing the familiarity of the
place. It’s the opening to the
alley. He turns ^ry slowly to
stare in and his eyes bug.

97. SLOW PAN TOWARD AND
THEN INTO THE ALLEY

There is the back end of a
sleigh and a reindeer. A small
elf stands close by holding the
team of reindeer. He looks
with happy expectancy at
Corwin'. Corwin looks down at
the tiny thing, closes his eyes,
and shakes his head,
absolutely discounting it. He
makes a gesture as if waving
the elf back into oblivion and
starts - to move away.

[The Night of the Meek

ELF

(A little persistently.)

Hello. We’ve been waiting
quite a while, Santa Glaus.

98. CLOSE SHOT CORWIN

He turns, a little wild-eyed, to
stare behind him and then
. back toward the elf. He
blinks, gulps, pointing to the
pipe in the elf’s mouth.
CORWIN
Oh no.

ELF

Did you hear me? I said
we’ve been waiting quite a
while, Santa Claus.

(Corwin, again wide-eyed,
points to himself questioningly.)

99. CLOSE SHOT ELF

(Who nods.)

ELF

We’ve got a year of hard
work ahead of us to get
ready for next Christmas!

Come on -are you ready?
(Corwin gulps again and then
starts to walk toward the
reindeer. The elf goes over to
the sleigh and beckons Corwin
in.)

DISSOLVE TO:

100. EXT. THE STREET IN
FRONT OF THE POLICE
STATION

As Flaherty comes out arm in
arm with Mr. Dundee. They
obviously feel no pain.

DUNDEE

Going home now, Officer
Flaherty? *

FLAHERTY

(Smiles happily through
glazed eyes.)

Going home, Mr. Dundee.

And you?

DUNDEE

(With a happy smile of his
own, beams beneficently.)
Going home, Officer
Flaherty. This is the most
remarkable Christmas Eve
I’ve ever had.

101. CLOSE SHOT

As he stops, looks off, then
stares at Flaherty, who in

100

turn looks, up toward the sky.
There’s the unmistakable
sound of reindeer bells.

102. TWO SHOT FLAHERTY
AND DUNDEE

As they gape up at the sky.
DUNDEE

Fla-Fla-Flahertyl I could
have sworn that-
(He looks at the policeman,
who is blinking and rubbing
his eyes.)

Did you see it?

FLAHERTY

I thought I did.

DUNDEE

What did you see?
FLAHERTY

Mr. Dundee -I don’t think
I’d better tell you. You’d
report me for drinking on
duty-
DUNDEE

Go ahead! What did you see?
FLAHERTY
(Gulps)

Mr. Dundee -it was Corwin!
Big as life ... in a sleigh
with reindeer, sitting
alongside an elf and riding
up toward the sky.

(He closes his eyes and gulps
again.)

That’s about the size of it,
ain’t it, Mr. Dundee?

103. CLOSE SHOT DUNDEE

(Who nods and in a very
small, strained voice.)

DUNDEE

Flaherty . . . you better
come home with me. We’ll
open up some hot coffee

. . . and we’ll pour some
whiskey in it ... and
we’ll . . .

(He looks up toward the sky
once again and then down at
Flaherty and his smile has a
sudden rich compassion.)

And we’ll thank God for
miracles, Flaherty!

104. DIFFERENT ANGLE
THE TWO MEN

As they start to walk away
from the station house down
the snow-covered sidewalk.

105. TRACK SHOT WITH
THEM

As over them we hear
Serling’s voice.

SERLING’S VOICE
A word to the wise ... to
all the children of the
twentieth century . . .
whether their concern be
pediatrics or geriatrics;
whether they crawl on
hands and xnees and wear
diapers ... or walk with
cane and comb their beards.
There is a wondrous magic
to Christmas . . . and there
is a special power reserved
for little people. In short
. . . there is nothing
mightier . . . than the
meek! And a Merry
Christmas to each and all!
(As the camera pulls away on
the disappearing figures of
the two men who walk
through the snowy night, we
'FADE TO BLACK
THE END

rr~

H E

In February’s TZ. . .

• Cosmic solitaire. Some typfc of mind-games are
just idle fun to while away the hours, but next
month you’ll discover one whose impact is— literally—
universal. We’re all part of the action in Playing the
Game by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann.

• The beast lives! You’ll get a preview of the new
Avco-Embassy thriller, Swamp Thing, starring
Adrienne Barbeau and Louis Jourdan, and you’ll find
out how to take a creature out of the comic strips
and drop him in the middle of the bayou. Plus a
revealing interview with Swamp Thing’s controversial
director, Wes Craven, the man who gave us The
Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and
Deadly Blessing— and reached a new extreme of
movie horror.

• In memory of . . . A wisecracking computer
provides the strangest of vehicles for one man’s
journey backward to the love and pain of childhood
in My Old Man by George Alec Effinger— a story
of unusual power by a most unusual writer.

• And an ordinary tape recorder bears a massage
from beyond the grave— a message with bizarre
consequences for the living— in Leslie Alan
Horvitz’s The Voices of the Dead, the story of a
supernatural experiment so real you’ll want to try it
yourself.

• Red thumb. Aunt Charlotte planted roses, but she
herself was more like the thorns. Now she’s
dead— and other folks are starting to die, too. Heed
the warnings, keep your distance, and learn the
method to her madness in Essence of Charlotte by
Charles L. Grant.

• Surely you’ve noticed . . . Just as toast tends to
fall jelly side down, subways usually come from the
wrong direction first. Richard Bowker reveals why

in The Other Train Phenomenon.

• There are monsters In Manhattan— and by no
means all of them are human. In The Gargoyles of
Gotham, photographer Don Hamerman and writer
Stephen DiLauro take you on a trip around the
island . . . where strange creatures stare at you from
the rooftops.

• Rod Serling’s classic fantasy about the American
small-town dream— A Stop at Willoughby— comes to
you in script form, complete with photos from the
original tv show.

• In sunny Bermuda, sipping drinks at the hotel bar,
a vacationer encounters the unlikeliest of fellow
guests, who turns out to be— well, we won’t give
away his identity, but he’s one of the most famous
men on earth. You’ll meet him at his leisure in
Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson.

• Doom at the top. The creaking of an old wooden
staircase spells danger, death, and ghostly vengeance

in Top of the Stairs by Steve Schlich.

• Unelassifiable. The census taker’s job seems a
cinch: “Are you— check one— white, black, Japanese,
Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, American
Indian, Asian Indian, Hawaiian, Guamanian, Samoan,
Eskimo, Aleut, or Other?” This time, though, she
meets a household that just doesn’t fit any human
category . . . The author is Jor Jennings; the title,
appropriately, is “Other."

• Starting next month: Robert Sheckley takes over
TZ’s book column . . . and we begin a new guide to
Spectral Music by critic Jack Sullivan.

• Gabon Wilson’s still with us, though, covering the
latest films . . . and we present nine more memorable
episodes of Marc Scott Zicree’s Show-by-Show
Guide to 'The Twilight Zone. ’ Two dollars’ worth of
good reading in February’s TZ.

102

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